dewaaz Posted January 3, 2010 Share Posted January 3, 2010 Hi I'm new to Mac OS, so I thought I'd ask a quick question. I was having a few troubles with my setup lately (as well as some performance issues), so decided to reformat. I do, however, have my Home folder on a separate partition - I reformatted and pointed the OS to this partition. Lots of my preferences were kept, as well as application preferences, since the Library folder was also retained in the home folder (presumably). In Mac world, is this a no-no for reformatting? Is the 'best' option to delete the Library folder on a reformat? What is the best way to go about this? I want a complete reformat with everything 'wiped', but I also want to restore my documents, pictures, etc. (on my separate home folder partition) - only thing is, obviously, the Library folder resides in the same folder. Any help with this would be appreciated. Thanks! :) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cabron Posted January 3, 2010 Share Posted January 3, 2010 The only way to keep all your stuff is to use Time Machine in an external HD then reformat your Mac HD. You will never lose anything because Time Machine backup your entire HD. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PNWDweller Posted January 5, 2010 Share Posted January 5, 2010 You would want to do something like a "Carbon Copy Cloner" Clone to a secondary hard drive to get the full backup of what you are wanting. This will "Mirror" your last backup and even make the drive bootable. This saved me when my internal hard drive failed on the Mac and had to have it replaced. Now, if you took the cloned drive, you could drag/drop the necessary library files containing your data from cloned copy to fresh install. This will copy most of your registration data, saves etc... One thing in the Mac world though is that each application is self contained, that is - no registry or DLL's to mess with. If you right click on an Application and show contents, you will see that the data is in the file. This is why when you download files, a good portion are a single file you drag/drop into your Application folder. Following this logic, you can also drag/drop your program files from your cloned drive to fresh install. As odd as this sounds, with my external hard drive failed just recently, I have gone through at least 1 re-install of Snow Leopard. One time to troubleshoot to make sure it wasn't OSX (It wasn't - a controller board on the drive went bad), during this time, I had preserved my original install and basically drag/dropped my apps that I could to the App folder and that restored most of it. Not everything is that easy though - Trucrypt and Virtualbox both require installers as they place "hooks" into your system to operate properly. Your Library does contain important data for your programs often times concerning the "registration data" for purchased programs and/or for stored data such as 1Password's storage of your logins. This site probably explains it better than me. :) Basically, when I did my fresh install at first, I did copy over the keychain files as well as my required Library support files for the application I copied over (Delicious Library 2, 1password, Devonthink etc). This allowed each app to function as if it was never fresh installed. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TogaForComfort Posted January 6, 2010 Share Posted January 6, 2010 For a general reformat to the same base version of OS X e.g. 10.6.x it should be fine. I wouldn't do it if changing OS version though. As already mentioned; the best thing to use is time machine. It will deal with permission s and so on for you. If you do it by hand then you should take ownership of the Home folder using the chown command in terminal. this will make all of the files and folders yours with read write access. something like "sudo chown -R username path to home folder" should do. Before time machine this was the method I used. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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