Clean reinstall of Mountain Lion deleted my iLife applications. How do I get them back? I purchased my 13-inch Macbook Pro in July of 2010. It came with Snow Leopard and allowed for a free upgrade to Lion, which I duly took up.

I have since purchased Mountain Lion. I decided it was worthwhile doing a clean install of Mountain Lion and did so successfully except for the one (major) hitch -- iLife is not available anymore.

I've read things in forums that say I should "accept" something or other on the Purchases tab in the App Store to get iLife back, but nothing of the sort appears on the Purchases tab.

How do I get back the iLife suite? Are they lost without shelling out more money, which seems a ridiculous thing to need to do.
This depends on whether your copy of iLife was purchased through the App Store, installed from DVD, or was just the version that came with the MacBook originally. If you had purchased from the App Store, it should be just as easy as going to the app store and redownloading your apps. If not, then you'll either need to reinstall from DVD or purchase the new versions of iLife. Your MacBook should have come with an install DVD for both OS X, and for iLife.

Another solution is to use the Migration Assistant and Time Machine to restore your apps. That's by far the easiest way to get all of your old stuff on your new system. Of course, it'll pull in more than just iLife.

Finally, if you have a Time Machine backup, you can still restore from it. Option-Click on the Time Machine icon at the top right, and choose "Browse Other Backup Disks". That will let you get into the backup from your previous setup.

Good luck!