How to backup a development app before to reformat my hard-drive

Hey there,

I have quite a lot of issues on my mac right now and I want to reformat my hard-drive completely. However, I want to be able to keep my application, which is still in development, all of its files and database datas.

I presume that for all the files I could simply compress it and put it on my external hard-drive. But what about all of the other informations? Like my VM and the database in it? Is there an optimal way to backup everything except my files?

Thanks