What exactly does Time Machine back up?

Sorry if this is in the wrong subforum

My Macbook Pro has been crashing a lot recently, I've tried running virus scans and verifying disk permissions and such, but to no avail, it just freezes and won't unfreeze until I hold the power button. It's not even a year old, so it's pretty annoying.

I decided today that I'm going to format the disk and reinstall Leopard on it, to see if it makes any difference. But, I really don't want to have to go through the whole mess of getting all my programs back, and getting and configuring all their addons and stuff, like all the addons for Firefox. Does Time Machine back up programs and their settings? If I use it to restore my Mac, would it restore the programs as well as whatever might be wrong with it?

I realise the latter is a stupid question, since it could be anything that's wrong with it... but... you know...

Any help is much appreciated.

Time Machine will backup any file that has changed since the previous backup, unless you explicitely tell it to exclude specific files/folders from backing up.

It will also restore whatever you ask it to restore in whatever state it was in at the time of the backup, corrupted or not.

The good thing is that TM can store multiple copies of the same file and you can travel back in time to find the correct version.

When you do a clean install, it might be better installing your apps. from scratch as well ..... I know this can be painfull.

Cheers ... McBie

Similar has happened to me, the hard drive on my 10 month old MBP 'give up'. The nice men at Apple replace it under warranty, luckily i have a TM that backs up daily.

Now here is the thing, because the misses took the machine in and collected it, it now comes up with her name in the log in box at start up, i managed to guess the password (apple) from new it always had my log in name - will this matter when i restore from the TM. I have used the migration assistant and followed all steps and left it on, over night and in the morning it said that everything has been copies successful. Thing is nothing has, there are no photos and no docs. I have set up my sky email address from the beginning because the settings did not transfer.

Does anybody know what i am doing wrong??

Also will itunes return to as it was?

thanks in advance.