If by
Originally Posted By: jchuzi
could I recover from them
you mean could you run Migration Assistant against them the answer is yes. I would recommend installing fresh copies of the apps however, because of potential compatibility issues. For example an incompatible version of SoftRAID rendered my system un-bootable by causing immediate Kernel Panics every time I attempted to boot the system.

If we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?

— Albert Einstein