Snow Leopard Prep

Thursday, August 27th, 2009
by Michael Sherlock


Snow Leopard is coming upon us and it’s about time to upgrade. $29 is a sweet spot for this brand new operating system but is this evolutionary OS worth the loss of your precious data? No Way! I suggest playing this upgrade safe and preparing for the worst. Over the next few minutes I’m going to help your upgrade along by recommending steps you should take to make this processes as pain free as possible.

What You Need

  • An External Hard Drive
  • Time Machine
  • Time

Maintenance
Before you do anything, it’s time for some maintenance. I went through the folders I use the most and deleted all the unnecessary files. From old documents to program DMG’s, I removed most of the unneeded bloat from my hard drive. Not only is this a generally good habit, it saves some space on your drive and makes your back-up that much shorter. From there, I sorted extraneous files and cleaned up my desktop. (Right now, the only icons on my screen are of the three hard drives.) Basically, I preformed spring cleaning in August.
I also suggest taking inventory of all the applications and preferences panes you have installed. Jotting down the few panes you have isn’t an issues but if, like me, you have a lot of apps hand writing them all down is troublesome. For that, open up terminal and type: “ls /Applications/ >> appsiuse.txt” without quotes. You’ll now have a text document with all your apps listed.
Check Your Software
Some maintenance every now and again is worth while but before investing any more time and money into this upgrade make sure the software you use most is supported. If you NEED a certain application and for whatever the reason, it doesn’t work, you’re in trouble. If you have a back-up you could reinstall leopard and restore you’re back-up but that’s a hassle. Use this wiki to check what software is currently supported in snow leopard before moving on.
Back-Up
The bread and butter of this post: protecting your data from failure. It’s highly recommended that you back-up your computer regularly but I cannot stress how important this is now. Installing a new OS posses the largest risk for error and you can never be too careful with your documents and irreplaceable media.

While other tools such as carbon copy cloner and SuperDuper work well, I’ll be using time machine for this post. Grab a clean external hard drive, firewire is recommended for speed and the ability to boot from the drive, and plug it into your mac. From there, go into your applications folder, launch time machine and turn it on.

Now, just let the program run it’s course. When you first enable time machine it will create a complete back-up of your computer. For me, after maintenance and moving youtube videos/events to a different external hard drive, I had about 170GB of data that needed to be backed up. This process can take some time so I recommend backing up your entire hard drive the day before your upgrade. This saves time when you have snow leopard in hand and allows you some breathing room to resolve any issues you may have.

That’s everything you should do before installing snow leopard. The easiest way to upgrade is to choose upgrade in the snow leopard installation interface. Ideally, it will install snow leopard and keep all your settings, documents, and media the way you left them in leopard. However, for those of you who want to start fresh, you can always wipe your drive clean and install snow leopard by it’s self. From there, you can restore your data from time machine or just start from the beginning: it’s your choice. I plan to detail this process, in video, in the near future so stay tuned and subscribed.

Tags
Categories

29 Comments

Stuart

August 27th, 2009
at 6:29pm

Snow Leopard is a great operating system. A clean install can make the experience much more enjoyable.

cawalasi

August 27th, 2009
at 6:43pm

- good post i’m guessing your getting it this friday hope you like

elquer

August 27th, 2009
at 11:36pm

what would be different from a clean install and an upgrade from leopard?

Ryan

August 28th, 2009
at 10:33am

Clean install means you’ll start fresh. It’ll be like setting up a brand new Mac. On the other hand, an upgrade will maintain all your original program and settings. It’ll be like booting up in Leopard except you’ll have all the new Snow Leopard features. A clean install will run snappier since there’s no more old junk, but you’ll also have to reinstall/migrate data.

Paulo

August 28th, 2009
at 3:24pm

I was just looking here i saved 59 Gb of space, is that happen with everybody also?

Ryan

August 28th, 2009
at 4:10pm

I just installed it and it worked fine. Also if the power goes out while upgrading you’ll be fine because Apple included a feature that will save your computer in that event. I installed Leopard and had no problems so I just put the snow leopard disc in, clicked install and everything worked fine. Just wing it. Everything will be fine.

Twitter Trackbacks for Snow Leopard Prep | Michael Sherlock dot com [michaelsherlock.com] on Topsy.com

August 29th, 2009
at 12:40am

[...] Snow Leopard Prep | Michael Sherlock dot com michaelsherlock.com/2009/08/27/snow-leopard-prep – view page – cached Before upgrading to snow leopard, make sure you perform some maintenance, check for supported apps, and back-up your data. — From the page [...]

Snow Leopard Prep | Mac Affinity

August 29th, 2009
at 4:16am

[...] Continue reading here: Snow Leopard Prep [...]

Don

August 29th, 2009
at 9:41am

Really want to do a clean install and back up from time machine. But I heard that backing up from time machine would just replace all the crud that my Mac has collected over the years anyway. It would be nice to start from the beginning but the prospect of individually backing up all my iTunes playlists, calendar entries, iphotos..etc is daunting. Any suggestions??

Don

August 30th, 2009
at 3:14pm

Okay, heres my latest plan (been doing a bit of research while waiting for the OS to arrive in the post – in the UK so takes a while). I install SL over L and then do a time machine backup again, just to be safe. Then I do a clean install and individually copy across the things I want on the new system, ie. music, iTunes playlists/libraries, calendar entries, photos, address book… Will this work?

Utah Scott

November 14th, 2009
at 4:22am

I installed Snow Leopard over Tiger, and now my Imac is much slower and I can’t empty my trash?
Oh, I could empty it, but it want’s to delete everything on my hard drive. When it got to 300,000 items that it wanted to delete, I became concerned and stopped the “Empty Trash” process?

Anyone know how I can get my computers speed back to what it was before SL, and how I can empty my trash again?

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Scott

Lance

April 17th, 2010
at 1:08am

Utah Scott:
Did you actually install Snow Leopard over an existing Tiger system? I was told this isn’t an option, that the Tiger files must be removed before Snow Leopard will install. Did you get any message during the Snow Leopard install that hinted to you your files would be removed? If not, Apple goofed in their design of the installer, and the files were removed without warning. Look at the files in the trash and try to determine if they are your personal documents that you created or simply old Tiger system files. If the former, drag them out of the trash and put them where you want to keep them, such as music in your home “Music” folder. If they are all Tiger system files, you might as well say goodbye to them. They will be of no use if you only want one OS on your drive.

As far as speed, give us some concrete statements, such as “When I open Safari, it takes 45 seconds, but with Tiger it only took 12 seconds.”

Cheap Jordans

May 18th, 2010
at 6:12am

Your essay is good! Photograph good-looking! Obviously. Simple language, concise blog! Another kind of style! I like! Thank you for sharing! I wish you good luck!

Air Yeezy

May 31st, 2010
at 2:45am

From your post, I know it’s not easy to collect information for your writing. so good. I like your writing style. Air Yeezy

New Jordans 2010

June 2nd, 2010
at 8:29pm

Picking up your great blog, I consider it is of the distinctive skills and absolute inspiring ideas.Think that I will certainly be given what precisely I request coming from your ideas.Best wishes to you!

How To: Snow Leopard Upgrade/Install (Simple) | How to How To: Snow Leopard Upgrade/Install (Simple) Video | HowTubely - How to Videos

June 17th, 2010
at 6:27pm

[...] If you haven’t already done so, make sure to check out my blog post ensuring that you and your mac are ready for upgrade. http://michaelsherlock.com/2009/08/27… [...]

mbt shoes

August 26th, 2010
at 8:35pm

I absolutely have enjoyable reading your blog. dont stop posting the excellent quality info!

cheap uggs

August 28th, 2010
at 11:55pm

Your essay is good! Photograph good-looking! Obviously. Simple language, concise blog! Another kind of style! I like! Thank you for sharing! I wish you good luck!

uggs outlet

September 17th, 2010
at 3:30am

Greate Post! Thanks for sharing..and certainly these are points really useful! thank you. Your blog are useful.

gucci outlet

September 17th, 2010
at 3:32am

Hey! Thank u for ur excellent article. And I also find a good thing to share with every body. Discount moncler jackets online hot sale now. thank you. Your blog are useful.

mbt shoes

September 23rd, 2010
at 8:45pm

Your blog is very good,very novel,let I learned a lot from,thank you very much.if you have time also attention our products.

james kerry

September 28th, 2010
at 12:35am

Pleasant blog Nate…it’s very interesting in view of the fact that I love this too…I’ll look ahead for your blogs shortly… dissertation help | essay help | assignment help

UGGS OUTLET

October 18th, 2010
at 3:18am

Excellent list! I’ve learned more from this forum in about 2 days than I have at any other forum community.

Austin

April 21st, 2011
at 1:59am

Apple is really good OS but there are no great games for this when compared to windows.

james anderson

October 31st, 2011
at 8:57am

Did you get any message during the Snow Leopard install that hinted to you your files would be removed? If not, Apple goofed in their design of the installer, and the files were removed without warning. Look at the files in the trash and try to determine if they are your personal documents that you created or simply old Tiger system files. If the former, drag them out of the trash and put them where you want to keep them, such as music in your home “Music” folder. If they are all Tiger system files