osx back up question

In order to clean my harddrive and start over I would like to know the location of my address book data, the bookmarks data, calendar data and the emails as well as movies, photos and tunes.
Where does the system hide all that stuff?

Thanks for any help

Uwe

For what? Are you going to back them up or just make sure they are completely deleted?

To load them back on to the newly formatted drive which has the new, fresh system.

Uwe

Okay.

You can back up most of the data within the application itself.

For the address book:
Open it up and go to File > Back up address book. It will ask you where you want to save the back up to. When your on your "fresh" system open address book again and go to File > Revert to address book backup.

For the bookmarks:
Open Safari. Go to File > Export Bookmarks. Save it where you want. With your "fresh" system open up safari and go to File > Import bookmarks.

For the calendar:
Open iCal. Go to File > Back up database. Save it to where you want. With your "fresh" system open up iCal and go to File > Revert to database backup.

For your mail:
I can't really help you there. All my mail stays on the server so when I set up my mail account again it automatically gets downloaded again.

As for all your media files:
They are usually saved in your Documents, Movies, Pictures and Music folders. You can view these folders by opening the Finder. When I back up my iTunes i copy the whole iTunes folder. This allows me to save ratings and song play counts. When I am on my "fresh" system I simply open itunes and agree to the TOS. Then close it and copy my backup iTunes folder over the newly created one.

If you have any questions or need me to explain further then please let us know

Well, but what if you can't open the application anymore?

Let me explain.

I run two identical systems, one on my Macbook and the other on an external drive. I keep most everything on the external drive so during travel I do not endanger the whole farm.

When I boot I always see the application with its data which resides on the boot disk, I have never been able (possibly my lack of knowledge) to access, let's say in the calendar, the data on the 'other' calendar which is located on the 'not booted disk'.
That has never bothered me much though, if I need to I just re-boot using the other hard drive.

Now the external drive has developed issues and the Apple disk utility I use recommends a clean sweep from original disks.

But because I can no longer boot from that drive I do not know how to get to the data. Sure, the drive appears on my desktop and I can dig around in it, but I cannot boot. Therefore I will need a different approach from the one you suggested to get to my data.

Thanks for your help Uwe

Help with data recovery

If anybody knows how to get to the data sets mentioned in this thread I would REALLY appreciate a hint.

Thank you Uwe