Since I’m oldskool (and since Time Machine stopped working nearly one month after I started using my new Mac), I was compelled to do a manual backup of my system before reinstalling it.

Yes, I reinstalled a MacOS system in less than one year. I remember doing this just when I was reinstalling Ubuntu from scratch after the release of a new version. Not really what I was expecting from a Mac.

Anyway… What I did was just an rsync of my whole home to an external disk, but then I had to recover the most I could. Reinstalling is fun, but reconfiguring everything not as much!

So here’s a cheat sheet of the directories I had to (manually) restore in order to bring back some configurations:

• Cyberduck: ~/Library/Group Containers/G69SCX94XU.duck (source)
• Microsoft Remote Desktop: keep your ~Library/Containers/com.microsoft.rdc.mac (source)
• Netbeans: ~/Library/Application Support/Netbeans
• Tor Browser: ~/Library/Application Support/TorBrowser-Data (bookmarks and settings)
• VirtualBox: copy your VM disks (usually ~/Virtualbox VMs) and their definition from ~/Library/VirtualBox

Generally, for all the stored password you need to copy your keyring which is in ~/Library/Keychains/login.keychain.

 

image credit: themindtrap.com