There's a great tip I learned to reinstall most of your apps after a
fresh install.

Before re-installing, enter the following in a terminal:

dpkg --get-selections "*" > Desktop/applications

This will create a text file called applications on your desktop. If you
haven't got a separate /home partition, make sure you save this file
along with the rest of your data.

Once you've done the install and restored your data, including the
Desktop/applications file, you can enter the following commands in a
terminal

sudo apt-get update
sudo dpkg --set-selections < Desktop/applications
sudo apt-get -u dselect-upgrade

et voila, most of your apps (those that are in the repositories) are
back again.