Partition

The first thing we need to do to prepare our computer is to partition our hard drive. Partitioning essentially splits your hard drive up into two virtual drives that run independently of one another. Right now you probably have one partition where Snow Leopard and all your files are stored. Creating another one for Lion is very simple.

1. Close all open applications
2. Launch Disk Utility
3. Select your internal hard drive in the left sidebar
4. Choose the partition tab
5. Click the plus button to create a new partition
6. Name and size your new partition
7. Click apply and let disk utility run

It’s really that easy to set-up a new partition in Mac OS X.

Launch Installer

Now that your partition is complete you’ll want to being the installation process. Open the Mac OS X Installer you downloaded from the Mac App Store. Agree to the terms of service but when the installer asks you to begin installation make sure to click “Show All Disks”. This will allow you to select the new partition you just created instead of your Snow Leopard partition.

You will also notice a customize button in the bottom left of your screen. From there you can personalize your Lion installation to include Lion server and such. Moreover, installation will take less than thirty minutes because the installer is stored locally on your hard drive and not on a DVD. The system will automatically restart and complete installation so feel free to get up and leave while the software is installed.

That’s it, you can boot into either Snow Leopard or Lion. To choose, simply hold down the option key while booting and you’ll see a nice graphic allowing you to select whichever operating system you want. Furthermore, you can go to system preference and startup disk to choose your default boot OS. Very easy, and very painless. Enjoy Lion everyone!

• QuickTime X

Apple’s upgrade from QuickTime 7, what happened to 8 and 9, includes many new features making it more powerful than ever. For no extra cost, you can capture video, audio, and even your screen. In the past video capture required quicktime pro and screen capture required third-party software. Apple has saved you all some money by implementing these tools into QuickTime X for no additional charge. Basic editing, in the form of trimming, has also been added and the ability to upload directly to mobile me or youtube is a plus.

• Exposé

One of my favorite features in OS X is exposé. Apple has improved exposé by organizing your winodws in a grid and allowing you to sort your applications by name (CMD+1) or application (CMD+2). Dock exposé has also been added allowing you to click on an app in your dock and view all instances of that applications. On the topic of your dock, you now can minimize applications directly to their icon in the dock instead of their own location.

• Stacks

Stacks has been updated allowing you to scroll through long grids instead of shrinking the icons. You can also drill into folders in the stack instead of being forced to open the finder.

• Finder

The finder has been rewritten in snow leopard making it leaner and quicker. Graphically, the finder looks the same but now supports icons at 512 pixels. I doubt I would actually have my icons that large but it makes it possible to read text from a document, in the finder, without even opening preview or quicklook.

• Services

Now, instead of cluttering the menu, only services that work in each particular app is shown.

• 64Bit

Snow Leopard is both 64bit and 32bit. I’m not sure how this works on a technical level but natively supporting both 32 and 64bit applications is wonderful.

• Exchange Support

Apple has finally opened their platform to serious business users. Snow Leopard now completely supports exchange right out of the box. Nuff’ said.

• Text Substitutions

(c) now becomes ©, (r) becomes ®, 1/2 becomes ½, and the list goes on. In fact, you can create your own substitutions in the language and text pane in system preferences. All cocoa apps are supported and developers can bring support to their carbon apps as well.

• Smaller Footprint

Apple says you can save up to 7GB of space by installing snow leopard. Although snow leopard is leaner than leopard, benefits are skewed because snow leopard and leopard use different number systems. Compare the available bytes and not the GB number you see.

• ZFS Support

Snow Leopard uses the ZFS file system as well as HFS+. Although HFS+ won’t be completely eliminated any time soon, you do get some benefits including data redundancy and auto error correction from ZFS.
Apparently, apple dropped this feature before launch. I was actually looking forward to the benefits but apple was having licensing issues and dropped ZFS from snow leopard. 10.7 anyone?

• Multi-Touch Trackpad

Have you ever wondered why newer laptops included more gestures leaving your machine limited to one or two finger commands? Well, as I often said, this is a software restriction and now all multi-touch trackpads will be able to to gesture with one, two, three, or four fingers.

• iChat

Technical requirements are much less strenuous in snow leopard using around ⅓ of the bandwidth for video chats. Because of this, iChat is now more reliable and supports video chatting at the higher 640×480 resolution.

• Security

Although apple advertises how safe their system is, and how vulnerable windows has become, Apple has taken it upon themselves to give their users more protection. From parental controls to phishing protection, and hard drive encryption snow leopard is the most secure version of OS X to date. In fact, virus and malware protection has been added and enabled right out of the box.

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.

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