Reformatting my Mac

[legazy]

So lately my mac book pro has been running a little slow and with summer approaching (no school) i would like to reformat my mac then. I will aslo be adding additional ram when reformatting. So how would I go about doing this? I have an external hard drive for a mac. So do I just backup everything I want? Is there a "best" way to backup all the files on my computer? What do I do after I've backed up everything?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

 

[Mattie Num Nums]

Boot to the restore partition, open disk utility, create a disk image of your hard drive, save it to the external, format, install os, migrate data from disk image. Best thing is if the OS install fails or something you can always revert back to the disk image.

 

[legazy]

Boot to the restore partition, open disk utility, create a disk image of your hard drive, save it to the external, format, install os, migrate data from disk image. Best thing is if the OS install fails or something you can always revert back to the disk image.

How long does this usually take? Can I only take certain things off the disk image? Or should I just delete what I don't want before I make the disk image?

Thanks for all the help

 

[Mattie Num Nums]

How long does this usually take? Can I only take certain things off the disk image? Or should I just delete what I don't want before I make the disk image?

Thanks for all the help

I've noticed 80 gigs of data takes an hour or two to create the image. I would always recommend cleaning up before making a full backup.

 

[legazy]

I've noticed 80 gigs of data takes an hour or two to create the image. I would always recommend cleaning up before making a full backup.

Thanks!