Clean install, migration, time machine

I am not a MAC OSX specialist in any way, but I would like to share what I have found out the hard way about the clean install.
1) Never do this unless you are absolutely sure that you have complete back up. Time machine cannot restore to the latest backup status, it can only go back to full backups and those are not made very often. In my case it was July 29, 2012. What a surprise! . Do the vital backups by hand. I propose copying your home folder to an external disc or usb pen drive. Copy Application folder as well. Why? If you are fond of iWorks'09 and hate new versions and you do clean install your favourite software is gone. You may just as well erase your Time Machine disc and start backup from clean drive. I didn't do it.
2) Make copies of your mails.
3) If you purchased software outside AppStore make notes of serial codes. Mail backup helps.
4) When making USB drive bootable do it this way: http://forums.macrumors.com/showpost.php?p=18081307&postcount=3 it preserves RECOVERY partition which is needed for FIND MY MAC option and it is usefull to have it anyway. Place the USB intended for clean install directly into your MAC, don't use USB hub.
5) Migration assistant never worked for me. The reason might have been that my last full Time Machine backup was done 18 months ago, and it was 10.8... I have read quite a lot about getting restore from the Time Machine, and dwelled on the subject myself.
I can't give explanation why that happened but that is found out the hard way:
- I discoverd that long name of the user should be different than the one you used before clean install.
- After doing trial and error attempts I made short user name the same as in my user before clean install, and started it with a capital letter. Why? That gave me access to my time machine. When the I had a different short user name than stored in time machine then upon entry into time machine all the backups well dimed and going back was not possible. With the same short name the backups were accessible. The system complained that I had no permissions to access the folders. But that is possible to change. When you look up Time Machine folders in Finder, those that are restricted to you have got red circle with a white line inside. Ctrl click on the restricted folder and select Get info. Add yourself as a user that has the access and change permissions to read and write. Your Documents folder appear in every back up in Time Machine. The best it is to change the permissions in the latest backup.
At the end of the day I managed to recover my mail. Data from other programs and my old MBP is up runnning again and faster. It takes however, a lot of work to make it.
The biggest pitty is that I lost my Pages v4.3 and now don't have an option to recover it.

Are you sure its not shown?  It should have a yellow or green icon, and list the name of the system and HD that was backed-up, not the one it's on.
If not, try to repair the backups, per #A5 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting.

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