Will I Lose My Time Machine Backup?

[Howard54]

I have a 2007 Mac Mini and over time I have added a boot camp partition, installed Parallels, and added a number of programs and utilities. Earlier this year I upgraded to Lion and added a Time Machine backup on an external drive.
Now I want to reformat the Mac Mini’s drive and do a clean reinstall of Snow Leopard/Lion, eliminate the boot camp partition, and clean out all the unused programs and utilities.

My question is what will happen to my Time Machine backups when I reattach the drive to the clean install. Will my old backups be retained so that I can access them and retrieve selected files if necessary, or will it see the clean install and delete all the prior backups? Anybody had experience with this issue before?

 

[MacForScience]

You can wipe your hard drive and do a clean install without damaging your time machine backups. You can then use Migration Assistant to restore data semi-selectively. Once you do this however you will loose access to your prior time machine backups.