For all those people who did a clean install of Snow Leopard and do not want to restore any data from Time Machine, you may find manually recover your iPhone Apps & data a huge time saver over re-downloading everything. Well you are in luck, as the solution is fairly simple.



App Recovery

1. Navigate to your last Time Machine Backup on your external drive.
2. Locate you home directory under the users folder from the root.
3. Apps are stored in ~/Music/iTunes/Mobile Applications. Just drag them into the iTunes window, with Applications selected from the sidebar. On the next iPhone sync, iTunes copied them onto the iPhone.

1. Disable automatic syncing in the iTunes preferences under Devices.
2. Replace ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/abc123 with an older version from Time Machine. Note that abc123 is a very long alphanumeric key identifying to your iPhone -- make sure you get the right one, in case you sync with several phones or iPods.
3. Plug in the iPhone.
4. iTunes is going to want to erase and sync your iPhone, it sounds terrifying but do it. It may also complain about replacing user account info... this is okay too.
   
5. Control-click (in the iTunes sidebar) on the iPhone and choose Restore from Backup. At the end of the process, your iPhone will automatically restart.