OS X personal info backup?

[brandon6684]

I'm looking to just to a full reformat and reinstall of OS X, but I don't want to lose a lot of the stuff I've accumulated such as my mail, address book, keychain, and other settings. While I know where to back up some of this stuff, I just know I'll miss something. Is there some little utility that will back most of the personal information, pretty much like the migration assistant, and then let me restore after the reinstall? Hint: I'm not going to pay $100 to make this happen.

 

[EricNau]

Most (if not all) of your data is stored in your user's "Home" folder.

I would recommend making a total backup (using a program like CCC) so your absolutely sure that you didn't miss anything.

 

[brandon6684]

Most (if not all) of your data is stored in your user's "Home" folder.

I would recommend making a total backup (using a program like CCC) so your absolutely sure that you didn't miss anything.

That's the think, I'm trying to get rid of all the "cruft" that's built up up. Occasionally I go in and try to delete all those settings and crap files left all over the system from when you uninstall a program, but it's just too much to do manually, especially when you use a lot of less than mac like Unix things that are all over /usr/bin and /etc. I want a clean install, but want to keep a my settings pretty much. I suppose that an exorcism on my home folder then backing that up might work, but I'm not sure if they new install will accept it as its own.

 

[sushi]

^^ Back up first by cloning your HD using ccc or Superduper.

Then go in and delete what you think you don't need. If you mess up, you have a clone to fall back upon.

Or after cloning, you can just do a clean install and then drag preference files and such from your clone over to the new installation.

 

[brandon6684]

^^ Back up first by cloning your HD using ccc or Superduper.

Then go in and delete what you think you don't need. If you mess up, you have a clone to fall back upon.

Or after cloning, you can just do a clean install and then drag preference files and such from your clone over to the new installation.

Clone is already out of the question, since this is already a cloned drive, which I suspect is part of the reason bootcamp won't repartition it. Also I install lots of things, even things that affected stability(especially the folding@home client), and while they were removed, I suspect that parts of some of those old apps are still lurking and causing the slight instability in my system from time to time.

I was hoping for some nice little app that would do it automatically, but it looks like I'm stuck doing it by hand.