orrinfacey01: Manually backup and restore a User Home Folder

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Manually backup and restore a User Home Folder

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.

Login as a local administrator, but not as the user account you want to backup.
Launch Disk Utility.
Choose File » New » Image from Folder...
Select the user's home folder /Users/[username].
Save the disk image to your backup drive.
Enter an admin username and password when prompted.

To restore:

When starting with a freshly restored or new computer use the Setup Assistant to create a local admin account that is NOT the same user name and short name as the u ...