How to Update your OS & Apps Properly and Save your System

[Randy Panado]

Thanks again for the reply.

Does the migration assistant work when pulling apps from a Tiger install to a FRESH Leopard install? I'll be upgrading to that OS which is why I'm going thru all this at the moment.

If I can put my old drive into a firewire enclosure, then install a brand new drive and put leopard on it, then use the migration assistant to pull apps onto the new install, I'll go that route. If that isn't possible, I'll just have to reinstall all the apps one by one :S.

thanks

[Robert Lane]

Yes, the M.A. should work just fine although some apps as mentioned before may ask for your install code again and some preferences may not transfer over completely.

[Brian David Melnyk]

i formatted and installed snow leopard on an external FW drive, booted to it and installed pro tools 8 to test it out as it wasn't working after i upgraded to SL on my iMac. it worked, so i then migrated over all other apps, settings etc. to the bootable FW (CS5, FCPS2 etc etc.) to test if all would work and play nice together. All is good and i actually set it all up to my liking.
Now i would like to wipe my internal drive (making it one partition instead of 2) and simply copy the external to the internal using disk utility's restore.
my questions are:
1) should i do all this by booting from the external and use disk utility, or should i boot from the install disk > disk utility?
2) when using 'restore', do i have to rename the internal destination drive the same as the external ('Snow Leopard Fire')? if i name the internal 'mac osx' will it mess up the apps i installed on the external?
or is there a better way to accomplish all this? (ie: wipe and fresh OS install on internal, then migrate all apps and data from external bootable drive).
thanks!

[David Knaggs]

I had an unfortunate hard drive failure on an iMac (with FCS, Shake and heaps of other audio-visual apps and plug-ins installed). The tech came around yesterday and put in a new hard drive. He said just to plug in the external hard drive (used for Time Machine). It completely restored everything. I was checking through the various audio-visual apps. All there and working.

I don't doubt what Robert says about all the various nuances. But the fact that Time Machine is built into the OS and you don't therefore "have to always remember" to back up (so long as you do set up Time Machine in the first place), means that it can navigate you through what might have been a potentially catastrophic occurrence.

Even if you back up using more exotic methods from time to time, I think it's a wise policy to always have Time Machine turned on and up-to-date. It should be the first and last defence against catastrophe.

[Robert Lane]

Time Machine has had and continues to struggle with completely talking to all the core components in pro apps like the FCP suite. I haven't checked since posting this original thread, but at one time there were dozens of bulletins from Apple warning that not all FCP components might be properly saved by TM.

However, one app that *does* work flawlessly - and has been mentioned before and is much simpler than this now older method I posted is to use Carbon Copy Cloner. The latest version is rock solid, totally free and "just works" sans all the glitches of TM.

[Nigel Barker]

Super Duper is an equally good application for backing up your disk. However Time Machine does a backup of any changes every hour so you are never lose more than an hour's worth of work. If you use SD or CCC every evening you may lose a whole day's worth of work if your hard disk fails. The advantage of CCC & SD is that a restore from a full disk backup is quicker than from a TM backup. The other great advantage of TM is that you can spool back x-hours or x-days to a time before you screwed up a preference file or accidentally deleted it.

Robert seems to have a 'down' on TM which may be from bitter experience but in Snow Leopard at least it works flawlessly with FCP & all other applications.

[Ed Roo]

Interesting that no one has mentioned performing HDD maintenance BEFORE updating the OS.
Personally, I run:
- Disk Utilities (Apple) and repair permissions
- TechTools Pro (Micromat, latest revision is v6)
- Disk Warrior (Alsoft, latest revision is v4.3)

TTP6 has some new features, one of which is cloning/imaging.

[Robert Lane]

My "down" attitude towards TM comes from Apple's own engineering publications that stated it "may or may not..." fully capture all pro apps components properly and for a time it seemed that was the case.

Those issues may have been cleared with the last round of service pack updates for OS X but intrinsically I still distrust it since I've seen CCC do it's job flawlessly - and without worry about TM making a backup during the middle of a critical render process overnight.

[Arnie Schlissel]

Originally Posted by Ed Roo

Interesting that no one has mentioned performing HDD maintenance BEFORE updating the OS.
Personally, I run:
- Disk Utilities (Apple) and repair permissions
- TechTools Pro (Micromat, latest revision is v6)
- Disk Warrior (Alsoft, latest revision is v4.3)

TTP6 has some new features, one of which is cloning/imaging.

I make a full backup and then format my drive before updating the OS. It's best to make a clean install of a new OS rather than updating one.