It's not mentioned in the beta's changelog, but it seems that PlayStation 4 firmware update v2.50 may allow you to back up your hard drive to an external device. A picture floating around on various forums shows an off-screen photograph of the procedure, which will allow you to move all of your applications to another place. This will, of course, come in handy should you decide to switch out the hard drive inside your system, as you won't be forced to download hundreds of gigabytes of data in one go. It could also come in useful if you demand extra peace of mind that all of your console's content is safe. We should get the official line on this soon, as the update seems imminent.
Good. They finally understood that not everyone has superb internet connection and simply can't download that much of data after every HDD format or replacement. Patches, DLCs and digital versions of games are really big in size these days. They should also add better manager for backing up only DLCs and Patches without game instal files if somone has games on Discs, but that will not happend because it looks like all files (Patches, DLCs and game instal files) are compiled in to one single file container.