Manual Fresh Re-Install of Mountain Lion- need to backup my imessages

[iansilv]

Hi- I am having the most frustrating problem with my email where it simply tells me the imap.gmail.com server is not available no matter what I do. I can get mail just fine on my iphone and imac, but my laptop I cannot.

I want to just do a fresh reinstall of mountain lion and I prefer to backup my files manually. So far I have everything I want to keep in my dropbox folder, now I just want to be sure I keep all of my imessages on my laptop, as I understand icloud does not completely back them up (or something) and not every single imessage is synced between my phone and laptop. So- can anyone tell me how to do this- how do I backup and restore my imessages so they will be back when I reinstall mountain lion?

Thank you in advance.

 

[benwiggy]

1. Are you planning on doing a fresh install as a possible solution to your Mail program? I would say that this is unlikely to help, or at least be "overkill" in terms of removing the one file that might be causing the problem.

2. You prefer to backup manually? Well, it's your time, I suppose. But the advantage of something like Time Machine to provide complete, automatic, versioned snapshots of your data cannot be overstated.

3. Your iMessages are stored inside ~/Library/Messages.