Time MACHINE question regarding hard drive restore...

Ok so i need to restore a hard drive with time machine. im going to be wiping my imac HD for a fresh install, hopefully things will run a little quicker. its seeming a little laggy these days. what im worried about with time machine though is that its going to restore all the little fragments of past installed/uninstalled programs and certain logs and settings ect.. the things that are currently bogging down the system. i know that time machine has a list of exclusions of what it doesnt restore.. but do i have to worry at all about time machine installing these things that i dont want? i would much rather just manually restore the system if this is going to be the case.
also, if i would manually restore the system from the time machine drive, i dont think i can just drag and drop backup folders from time machine and then pick and choose individual files and folders can i?
any help would be much appreciated!
just a heads up.. please dont reply if you're giving me your opinion because you enjoyed your experience with time machine restoration. im looking for fact and reality of what time machine does and does not restore. thank you

D00bysnacks wrote:
Ok so i need to restore a hard drive with time machine. im going to be wiping my imac HD for a fresh install, hopefully things will run a little quicker. Its seeming a little laggy these days.
That's rather a drastic step, which most likely won't help much, if any. Unlike with Windoze, you're usually better off to diagnose and fix the actual problem. See Baltwo's post here: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=11853228&#11853228
what im worried about with time machine though is that its going to restore all the little fragments of past installed/uninstalled programs and certain logs and settings ect.. the things that are currently bogging down the system. i know that time machine has a list of exclusions of what it doesnt restore.. but do i have to worry at all about time machine installing these things that i dont want?
If you tell Time Machine to do a full system restore, yes, it will do that. With certain exceptions, such as system work files, trash, most caches and logs, it will put your system back just as it was. That's it's purpose, after all.
i would much rather just manually restore the system if this is going to be the case.
Really? See the pink box in #11 Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions. Actually, it would be worse, if you don't use +Migration Assistant+ for your data.
also, if i would manually restore the system from the time machine drive, i dont think i can just drag and drop backup folders from time machine and then pick and choose individual files and folders can i?
You can't restore OSX that way. You can copy your data, but that may not work in all cases, and you'll likely have all sorts of permissions problems, as OSX will think the backups belong to a different user.
just a heads up.. please dont reply if you're giving me your opinion because you enjoyed your experience with time machine restoration. im looking for fact and reality of what time machine does and does not restore. thank you
You want free help, but only if it agrees with your version of reality? That's pretty cheeky.

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