To answer your question in brief “no”.
When I said I did a full “restore” I misspoke. I was actually talking about doing a hard drive wipe (via the quick reformat available when the system boots up) and then loading the OS and all other programs I wanted back on.
Like I said though it’s pretty easy once you know what you’re doing. The quick format option is good enough for this purpose. Typically took a Sunday afternoon of work. The longest step was updating Windows to the latest service packs.
This of course wiped any desktop preferences. I never kept any such prefs anyway; I always just used the default settings for my desktop. But I imagine such prefs could be saved somehow as a file to load at the end of the process. I don’t know how successful that would be as I never did it.
When I said I did a full “restore” I misspoke. I was actually talking about doing a hard drive wipe (via the quick reformat available when the system boots up) and then loading the OS and all other programs I wanted back on.
That's what I thought. It's a major design failure IMO.
When you restore on a linux/unix box, you just restore /home and all your desktop stuff magically reappears just as it was.
From what I understand Macs work pretty much the same way. All user customization goes in the home directory and is restored without having to jump through extraordinary hoops.
AmP