[amer001]

I am backing up my iPhoto Library to an external drive. This is iPhoto from the iLife 08. My question is the following:
If I was to reformat and drag the library back into the pictures folder and then open up iPhoto, will I also get back all my books, calendar, and albums?

thanks

[Veltliner]

Unfortunately, your post does not really show what you want to know.

Backing up is making a copy to your hard drive. If you do that manually, you drag the folder to the symbol of the external hard drive on your desktop, and it will be copied there.

If you reformat your external hard drive, it will destroy your back-up copy, so you will have to copy it again.

So, a true back-up doesn't need any "dragging back", as you never dragged your iPhoto library off your main computer.

I hope that's what you were asking about

[ginoledesma]

I think he's asking if his current backup procedure is correct such that in case he has to do a restore, his settings, aside from just the photos, are preserved.

To answer the original question, I believe it's yes, your calendars/books/etc will be preserved. If you want to keep everything in tact, I'd also recommend backing up the preference file stored in Library/Preferences/com.apple.iPhoto.plist within your home folder. It's not absolutely necessary, but saves you the hassle of reconfiguring iPhoto.

[amer001]

Yes, I will be reformatting the main drive on the iMac. But before that , I want to backup up to an external drive.