How do you backup ?

I would like to make sure I have a backup of. Key Chain, Mail settings and emails, Safari favorites, and Calendar and address book.

How can I do this?

Thanks

External hard disk - use Time Machine to backup.

Time Machine to an external HDD is an excellent way to start.

Have to add that I firmly expect to see an article appearing in our Mac Forum Blog in the next few days that will answer a lot of your questions. Suggest you watch for it.

I have a external drive that I can use. What I was not sure of is where these files are located. I'm not sure what file needs to be backed for like key chain, mail, calendar and so on. This would be for a clean install for ML.

The files that you mentioned are going to be in your user (home) folder. Might I suggest though that instead of doing that you create a bootable "clone" of your startup drive. This way if there are major problems with ML (which I don't anticipate), to you just don't like it, then it's relatively easy to revert to for current setup.

Take a look at Carbon Copy Cloner - Home. It will clone both the main partition and the hidden recovery partition in Lion.

Slydude . . . can you migrate apps/settings etc into a clean install of a different OS version from a CCC image? like you can with a Time Machine backup?

I've always taken them as a backup backup but as Time Machine (touch wood) hasn't failed me yet I've never needed to restore it.

Cloned base install (w/applications) to an external then put away i.e. not connected to power or in a computer..Nightly CCC Clone to a HDD located in the computer..My home folder is on a seperate drive not located on the boot drive therefore if I loose the boot drive or it goes bad there my data is safe and sound.

I'm pretty sure you can do that but don't remember if I have tried it. Recent event's make me pretty sure that Migration Assistant should handle jut with no problems.

I have two Macs that are both on the current version of Lion. When a hard drive in my MBP died I took the drive from the Mac Pro and used it to boot the MB Pro for several days till I could afford a new drive. When the new drive arrived I made a clone of the drive onto the laptop and booted with no trouble. I didn't try Migration Assistant but it should see the clone just as if you were transferring from another Mac.

The only thing I have had to do is remove a few things that are present on the Mac Pro but not needed on the laptop. The laptop does not, for example need the preference pane for a video capture card that's in my Mac Pro.

Cheers, good to know, makes sense when you look at it that way....