Because backing things up is tedious and repetitive, it’s easy to convince yourself that they are not so very important.

Still, it’s hard to imagine a bigger hit to your productivity than losing all your emails, Address Book and iCal data without having a good backup. (If needed, supplement your imagination with this horror story and this one .)

BackityMac is a new utility that makes backing up all your essential data a simple matter of a few clicks. It offers “pre-sets” for Mail.app data, iCal, Address Book and more:

Check the boxes you want, click “backup”. Instead of browsing around for the things that constitute a good backup of Mail (for example), the app does the hard work for you, and delivers it all freshly pressed into a new disk image.

In the event of a disaster, it also offers the option of restoring your data from one of these disk images, again a process of a few mouse clicks. Clever!

As a bonus, a second pane lists some maintenance tasks (and helpful notes on what each one is) that BackityMac can perform:

BackityMac is donation-ware and is available from the developer’s web site .