Backing Up Home Folder, etc

[cleo]

Hi all! I know I've been MIA the past couple days - birthday, school work, real work, and family all caught up with me at once. But, alas, I return.

Tonight my task is to back up all important stuff onto CD's and then reinstall my OS. I'm doing this partly out of need (I've really cluttered up my disk with loads of crap, and I'm starting to notice massive performance hits) and partly out of curiosity - I just want to see how much less scary of an enterprise this is on a Mac as opposed to a PC (I've always thought that forking over another grand for a new PC is better than trying to format a "C drive" and reinstall Windows - that's pure hell).

So, step one: Backing up my data. I'm using CD's and Toast. I obviously need to back up most of my Home folder. What's the best way to do this? Do I need to worry with all of the hidden files, or just the stuff I can see? Then, are there any other super-important directories anywhere else that I need to save?

 

[Macmaniac]

Most of the hidden stuff is from programs you install, so you really won't need to worry about that kind of stuff. As long as you have the CDs for the apps you will be fine. As long as you don't save things really deep in your home folder hiddem among other folders you should be fine.
Some advice for keeping things neat is to create a desktop folder for yourself, then put sub folders with topics of things that you normally save. Mine looks like this.
When you back up all you need to do is drag and drop. Have fun.

 

[mmmdreg]

haha! I did that just yesterday as well...I backed what I wanted manually using "ditto" in the terminal to a little backup folder...I then realised that was a waste of time as I could have just dragged the stuff onto CD's...I just backed up my Mp3'z, some Appz, the system library (fonts etc) and the library of each user plus any folders that they actually had stuff in...but you really don't have to backup anything apart from your documents and appz you can't be bothered installing again...

 

[cleo]

Originally posted by mmmdreg
haha! I did that just yesterday as well...I backed what I wanted manually using "ditto" in the terminal to a little backup folder...I then realised that was a waste of time as I could have just dragged the stuff onto CD's...I just backed up my Mp3'z, some Appz, the system library (fonts etc) and the library of each user plus any folders that they actually had stuff in...but you really don't have to backup anything apart from your documents and appz you can't be bothered installing again...

Okie, I'm done with my Home folder... when you say "system library" do you mean the one in the X System folder, or the one directly on the hard drive? They both seem to contain fonts, etc.

 

[mmmdreg]

i meant the library at /library so yeah, the one "directly on the hard drive"...