how to back up macbook pro 2011 that won't boot up properly

Hi there, apollosministry and welcome to the Apple forums. I'm glad that you had the good sense to do a backup.

what you'd need to do is to see if you can boot from the recovery partition that's built in to the OS. You can do that by pressing command and R at startup. If that doesn't work, you can plug an Ethernet cable into the back of your MacBook Pro and press command, option and R to see if Internet recovery might work for you. when and if you're successfully able to boot up from the Recovery Partition, run Disk First aid, which is under OS X tools at the top of the screen when you're in the Recovery Partition, then repair disk, which hopefully works. If not, maybe you could try Disk Warrior or TechTool Pro, which, sadly aren't free. You may wish to try Data Rescue 4. It may be that your hard drive is

dying--hopefully not---and there may not be much else you can do save replace it, either with a new hard drive, a fusion drive or an SSD.....

Hopefully whatever I have written here helps you out some....

oh and this is the part of the forum for Mac Pro's (the tower Mac), if you want better help, please consider posting in the MacBook Pro part of the Forum (I think it's under notebooks when you first hit the Apple Support webpage

good luck

John B

After you have attempted repairs, if your Mac will still not boot, you need "another place to stand" while you use mac OS to try and fix some things.

Get an external drive (a candidate for replacing your old internal drive) and an external enclosure or adapter to hold that drive while you work on it. Use Recovery (Command-R) to install Mac OS X on the external drive, and boot from it.

Now you are back in business with a working Mac OS, and can use additional Mac OS applications to make selective copies of your files. DO NOT copy the over 350,000 files that make up Mac OS -- they are replaced perfectly by a re-Install. Focus on your files found under /Users in folders by User-Short-name.

Once you have your files under control, you can swap drives to get back your portability. Or you can erase with write Zeroes to the old drive to see if it can be made to work again (this takes all afternoon, but from full MacOS, you can do it in the background).