my hard drive has to be replaced. what is the best way to back up all my data?

Get an external hard drive and use CarbonCopyCloner to backup your entire 10.8 system. CCC will also backup the hidden recovery partition, unlike some other backup programs.

Note that CCC is now commercial software & unless you made a donation to Bombich in the past, you will only be able to use the Mountain Lion qualified version for the free trial period without buying it. However, this won't prevent you from cloning your drive or restoring it, as long as you do both within the trial period, whether you decide to purchase it or not.

As for cloning the recovery partition, while you might want to do that for backup purposes, Apple should provide a replacement drive with a newly installed recovery partition on it as well as the OS, so you don't need to restore your backup copy of that partition to your new drive.

You have various options, with the drive in the machine and out.

My computer is dead, is my personal data lost?

Most commonly used backup methods

Access a internal drive that's not booting

Create a data recovery/undelete external boot drive

See:

http://www.macmaps.com/backup.html

http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/backuprecovery.html

I have the same issue, my HD is being recalled due to a defect for the mac.

So it has to be replaced...

How did you back up your system?

Need options...

You can create a disk image for your hardrive using the disk utility or a third party program.

I've been told to just use time capsule, but heard mixed reviews...

I downloaded the Carbon copy too...

What sort of external hard drive did you use?

Thanks I'll check it out...

Wow Fast service!

Thanks for your help, hopefully I'll have the same luck...