Recovering iWork from backup I recently changed my MBP 13" 2009 to the newer MBP 13" 2012.
I decided not to recover from Time Machine and install everything manually as to make a clean start.


  Although I do not have my iWork '09 disk with me. Is there a way to
  recover it from the backups? Simply copying the application does not
  work.


Also I am not able to download it from App Store, because I bought it from a retail store and not online.
You also need to recover library files:

/Library/Application Support/iWork'09
/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iWork09.installer.plist
/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iWork09.plist


In my case, this was the minimum requirement to get Keynote starting again. 

Additionally, you might want to recover user-specific files from your user directory:

~/Library/Application Support/iWork
~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iWork.*