Ecamm Live stores each show as a profile on your Mac, but it has no built-in "export this profile" button. To back one up safely you need to copy the profile's data and every overlay image, sound, and video it references — because a profile that's missing its assets looks fine until you go live and the overlays are blank. The reliable way to do it is with a tool that reads the profile, gathers everything it depends on, and packages it so you can restore it on the same Mac or a new one.
Why backing up Ecamm profiles is trickier than it looks
Ecamm Live is brilliant, but a profile isn't a single tidy file. It's a set of scenes, overlays, lower-thirds, sound effects and settings — and a lot of that is references to files sitting elsewhere on your Mac. A logo here, a stinger there, a music bed in your Downloads folder.
Copy the profile without those files and you've copied a skeleton. Everything looks right in the list, then you load it on a fresh machine and half your overlays are missing. I've watched people discover this five minutes before a show. It's not a good feeling.
So a real backup has to answer two questions:
- What does this profile actually contain?
- Where does every asset it uses live — and is it still there?
The manual way (and why it gets old fast)
You can do this by hand:
- Quit Ecamm Live.
- Find the Ecamm Live application-support folder where profiles are stored.
- Copy the profile data out.
- Hunt down every overlay and sound the profile uses, wherever they live, and copy those too.
- Keep it all together so a restore actually works.
It works once. But if you run more than one show, or you tweak your setup often, doing this by hand every time is exactly the kind of fiddly, error-prone job that never quite gets done — until the day you need the backup and it isn't there.
The reliable way
What you want is a tool that treats a profile as the whole package:
- Reads the profile and shows you what's in it.
- Extracts every asset it references — images, video, audio — and checks each one still exists on disk.
- Flags anything missing before you rely on the backup, not after.
- Backs the whole thing up to any folder — an external drive, a cloud-sync folder, a USB stick.
- Restores it on the same Mac or a different one running Ecamm Live.
This is why I built Ecamm Profile Manager. I had a pile of profiles I couldn't easily sort, clean up, or trust — and no way to know if a profile's assets were all present without loading it and squinting. So I made an app that lays them all out, scans each one for missing overlays and sounds, and backs them up as a complete unit.
A sane backup routine
However you do it, the routine that saves you is:
- Before a big show: back up the profile you're using, and run a missing-asset check so there are no blank overlays live.
- When you change machines: back up every profile, move the backups across, restore on the new Mac.
- Every so often: clean out profiles you no longer use so the list stays manageable.
The check-for-missing-assets step is the one people skip and the one that actually bites. A backup that quietly left an overlay behind isn't a backup.
Frequently asked
Where does Ecamm Live store its profiles?
In Ecamm Live's application-support area on your Mac. You don't normally touch it directly — the risk is that the overlays and sounds a profile uses live outside that folder, so copying the folder alone isn't a complete backup.
Can I move my Ecamm profiles to a new Mac?
Yes — as long as you bring the profile and all the assets it references. Back up the complete package on the old Mac and restore it on the new one running Ecamm Live.
Why are my overlays blank after restoring a profile?
Because the profile was copied but the image, video, or sound files it points to weren't — or they've moved. That's exactly the failure a missing-asset scan is meant to catch before you go live.
Can I delete several old profiles at once?
By hand you delete them one at a time. A management tool lets you select any number, including all of them, and clear them in a single action.
Ecamm Live doesn't give you a backup button, and copying the folder by hand leaves the door open to missing overlays at the worst possible moment. Treat a profile as its whole package — data plus every asset — check nothing's missing, and keep a real backup somewhere off your main drive.
If you'd rather not do the hunting yourself, the app I built to sort, clean, scan and back up Ecamm profiles is here:
Get Ecamm Profile Manager →