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I have a Macbook Pro with OS X Lion. I want to reinstall Lion without losing my data. I dont have a TimeMachine or backup hard disk. Can the Command+R option with Reinstall thing will wipe my data ? Is there a way so i can have a fresh OS X Lion and and preserve my files ?
MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.3)
You'll have to set it all up manually again if you do a clean restore, because it'll be just as if you'd gotten yourself a brand new Mac. If you don't want to get an external HD to do a Time Machine backup you could try to upload files to some hosting service but your settings will be gone and you'll need to import all the files back to your mac.
If you use the recovery HD partition to reinstall the OS over the top of your original install it will NOT wipe out the drive. It will not delete your files
You would have to do that manually using Disk Utility included on the Recovery HD.
But the question is why do you want to do this? What problems are you having that you want to re-install the OS?
If you have updated the OS to 10.7.3 and even "IF" the recovery HD download is on 10.7.2 it will not completely wipe out that 10.7.3 update and could leave you with a NON working computer. I do not know if it would or wouldn't as I have not tried it but there is a good chance that re-installing a older version of an operating system over the top of a newer updated one could make the system unstable.
how to reinstall lion without losing data
