Restoring selected files from Time Machine

Can't really comment on advantages/disadvantages of doing it either way, but...

The big user's of space are Videos.

And to make it easier to "hand" delete them...

How much free space is on the HD, where has all the space gone?

OmniDiskSweeper is likely the easiest/best, and is now free...

http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnidisksweeper/download/

Removing un-needed Languages can gain a lot of space also...

Monolingual...

http://monolingual.sourceforge.net/

Kevin le Bevin wrote:

I have a total of 160Gb on my white MacBook. I've hit the point now where the hard disk is almost full and causing me grief. Although I can go through my hard disk and selective delete all of the music files, applications, photos, videos, etc that I no longer want to retain I was considering the following sequence of steps:

1. performing a full back-up to Time Machine
2. performing a full Mac OSX reinstallation
3. after my OSX reinstall has completed, selectively restoring the files (mainly music and photos) that I want.

That may work fairly well with most types of data -- data that's in separate files.

If your photos are in iPhoto, it will be very hard to find the ones you want, but you can use the procedure in the gray box at the bottom of Time Machine - Frequently Asked Question #15.

Assuming your music is in iTunes, it may be difficult to find the ones you want.

If you have 3rd-party apps, there's a problem. You can restore individual "simple" apps (that were just dropped into your Applications folder), and if you work at it, the associated preferences files (in ~/Library/Preferences). But "complex" apps, that came with their own installers, won't work properly, if at all, because they have other files (and perhaps "helper" apps) in other places. Those will have to be reinstalled from the original discs.

Or, use Migration Assistant to transfer all the apps (and exclude everything else). See Using Migration Assistant on Snow Leopard or Leopard.

You must not be logged in to a user account that has read rights to those files. Permissions are not done by user account name, but by the mostly-hidden User ID Number (UID) that's assigned automatically. And one user, even an Admin user, doesn't normally have rights to other user's data.

See the pink box in Problems after using Migration Assistant for an explanation (it's the same problem whether you used Migration Assistant or not).

You'll have to experiment a bit, probably creating one or more new user accounts, to find the one with the same UID as the backups.

Once a user account has permission to see and restore the files, restore the files to an alternate location, either the special Shared user account or an external HD.

Then log on to the user account where you want the files to be, and copy them from the alternate location.