I recommend that in addition to your Time Machine backups you buy an external USB drive of a similar size to your internal drive and use CarbonCopyCloner (http://www.bombich.com) or SuperDuper! (http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html) to clone your drive to the external USB drive. That way once you've an easy restore path if anything goes wrong, a guaranteed copy of all your data, and if anything goes weird/missing you can manually copy files from the backup to your upgraded system.
If you don't meet the requirements for Mavericks, it's probably time to buy a new laptop. MacBook Airs are great wee machines and will be a substantial speed improvement over your current laptop.
it's just barely up to mavericks (minimal memory; i can clean up more hd space).
my external usb drive is far, far larger than my internal drive. i do rsync to a linux box for additional backups; is it still better to have the backup-software-generated stuff as well?
i think i'd rather the macbook pro than the air; it's not much heavier and nicer screen is nicer.... but i do not hate my old machine, i just need new features. guess that's a matter of gotta decide, too.
Tools like CCC and SuperDuper normally expect to turn your external drive into an exact clone of your internal one - you wouldn't want to use that drive for anything else. Given the price of USB drives these days, I'd just buy a new one just for this backup.
The best thing about CCC/SuperDuper backups like this is that the USB drive is bootable: if your internal drive dies (or you just need to go back to the older OS really quickly), you can just boot off of the USB drive and get to work right away.
awesome, thanks. my 10.5.8 is too old for ccc, but here's the plan:
. trial superduper (on hand)
. another drive (a 128g flash usb) to serve as intermediate boot drive if needed (ordered) ** i have a usb hard disk i've got for time machine; would it be better to switch these functions during the upgrade?
. a copy of snow leopard (ordered)
upgrade to snow leopard
** how do i then get ahold of mavericks and upgrade to that??
You upgrade to Mavericks through the Mac App Store, which was introduced in 10.6.6, one of the Snow Leopard updates.
So once you've upgraded to Snow Leopard, you'll want to run all the updates available for it, and then launch the Mac App store and look for Mavericks.
If it helps to give you confidence in the process at all, I just did the upgrade to Snow Leopard and then Mavericks thing on my mother's iMac which was running 10.5 or perhaps even 10.4, I think, and the upgrade went off without a hitch. Except for two things:
* she had to buy a new printer because HP did not make a compatible driver for the one she had (but also last time she bought ink for it, she was informed that the store wouldn't be carrying ink for it anymore, so clearly HP is generally phasing that particular printer out!). This is more a printer thing than a computer hardware thing, but check your printer's driver info on their website before you upgrade.
* She had Appleworks 6.0 on her computer (I think from an earlier computer than that in fact) and anyway, it doesn't work with Mavericks, which I didn't quite figure out until after I'd upgraded her. I'm still working on the fix for that, so that she can open her old cwk docs and save them as Word or anything else (luckily there aren't many files), but that is only because I ran out of time during my visit.
sweet, thanks for sharing your experience! i am going to go with a bootable flash drive (bc it was a good deal anyway and i'm kind of intrigued) and i'm still waiting for that and snow leopard to show up. further bulletins as events warrant :)
Does your Mac meet the requirements for Mavericks? http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5842?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US (Apart from the existing OS install, of course.)
If so, you could probably get away with installing Snow Leopard (this will cost you money: http://store.apple.com/us/product/MC573Z/A/mac-os-x-106-snow-leopard) as an 'upgrade' install, and then installing Mavericks.
I recommend that in addition to your Time Machine backups you buy an external USB drive of a similar size to your internal drive and use CarbonCopyCloner (http://www.bombich.com) or SuperDuper! (http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html) to clone your drive to the external USB drive. That way once you've an easy restore path if anything goes wrong, a guaranteed copy of all your data, and if anything goes weird/missing you can manually copy files from the backup to your upgraded system.
If you don't meet the requirements for Mavericks, it's probably time to buy a new laptop. MacBook Airs are great wee machines and will be a substantial speed improvement over your current laptop.
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my external usb drive is far, far larger than my internal drive. i do rsync to a linux box for additional backups; is it still better to have the backup-software-generated stuff as well?
i think i'd rather the macbook pro than the air; it's not much heavier and nicer screen is nicer.... but i do not hate my old machine, i just need new features. guess that's a matter of gotta decide, too.
thanks :)
Reply
The best thing about CCC/SuperDuper backups like this is that the USB drive is bootable: if your internal drive dies (or you just need to go back to the older OS really quickly), you can just boot off of the USB drive and get to work right away.
Reply
. trial superduper (on hand)
. another drive (a 128g flash usb) to serve as intermediate boot drive if needed (ordered)
** i have a usb hard disk i've got for time machine; would it be better to switch these functions during the upgrade?
. a copy of snow leopard (ordered)
upgrade to snow leopard
** how do i then get ahold of mavericks and upgrade to that??
thanks much again!!
Reply
So once you've upgraded to Snow Leopard, you'll want to run all the updates available for it, and then launch the Mac App store and look for Mavericks.
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* she had to buy a new printer because HP did not make a compatible driver for the one she had (but also last time she bought ink for it, she was informed that the store wouldn't be carrying ink for it anymore, so clearly HP is generally phasing that particular printer out!). This is more a printer thing than a computer hardware thing, but check your printer's driver info on their website before you upgrade.
* She had Appleworks 6.0 on her computer (I think from an earlier computer than that in fact) and anyway, it doesn't work with Mavericks, which I didn't quite figure out until after I'd upgraded her. I'm still working on the fix for that, so that she can open her old cwk docs and save them as Word or anything else (luckily there aren't many files), but that is only because I ran out of time during my visit.
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