Manually backup and restore a User Home Folder

Apr 05, '11 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: Aaron Wyatt

When troubleshooting a computer problem sometimes its best to just wipe the hard drive and start fresh. I developed the following method for backing up user home folders so that they can easily be restored to another computer or the same computer while preserving proper permissions, ACLs, and file/folder ownership.

To backup, use Disk Utility (in /Applications/Utilities/) to backup the user home folder.

To restore:
[crarko adds: This is the type of procedure I used before Time Machine automated the process. Before that I used to use ditto in a manner similar to this hint. There are many ways of doing this, but this one is pretty straightforward, and if for some reason Time Machine is not feasible this method will work.]

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