Normally that would be my advice as well, and it's usually solid however the major difference with SL is that it's not a complete revamp of core code, rather a feature tweak and clean-up of code.

The main reason I tested SL on a production machine (thankfully not mission-critical) was my hunch was that using the hybrid upgrade path would allow the new feature set to be used without introducing the huge amount of failures and massive bugs normally associated with upgrading the OS.

So far the only lack of usability I see is some of the EC34 cards haven't had SL compatible drivers posted yet, other than that it remains stable even on high-level apps like FCP, Compressor, Episode Desktop and Premiere Pro. In fact, renders in PP now outpace FCP renders by a large margin - strange. More testing required.

My SL experience
 

Honestly on a whole, I don't have much trouble with SL, I've enjoyed the extra 10GB+ that it freed up, other than that no huge changes that I noticed.
I've had it installed on my Mac Pro for a full week now (working on it everyday, FCP, DVDSP, Adobe PS, etc). The problems that I have found so far:

-FCP will not recognize either my tape deck or my camera for HDV ingest (via firewire). Yet iMovie does, and so I've ingested some video for a new project via iMovie in AIC, and then imported to FCP, everything seems in order, just a pain to have to use a consumer program (eww) ...although since I have to use a consumer program to Blu-ray (Toast), I've started getting used to Apple's strange disregard for us professionals.

-Printing problems with my Epson. The template and settings that I had set up for disc printing no longer work... I've had to rework those settings to get everything centered.

I don't use cards (obviously I use tape), and just put in a new 1TB before SL, so don't use external HDs much now either, honestly I think it's a pretty clean OS even in it's infancy.

Do you need to back up?
 

When upgrading to Snow Leopard do you need to back up all your music and photos, contacts, emails etc somewhere else? I guess I would like to know if installing it wipes out everything you have.

If you do an upgrade (which has been giving people problems.) you will not lose anything. However, if you do a clean install you will have to backup everything before you install SL.

Have a look at my post earlier in this thread for a method of doing this. You *must* back up anything you want to keep if you do a clean install. The essence of the clean install is that you wipe your hard disk and reformat it, and then install SL on that.

The method I suggested (and used myself) is a balance between the quality of a full clean and reinstall, and the convenience of not having manually to reinstall all apps and preferences.

This is no clean install imho.

What you are doing is essentially the same as what the Snow Leopard installer does when you do an archive and install. A clean install is one where you install the OS, install the applications and only import your assets and preferences. By 'restoring' with the migration assistant, you have the chance of putting back broken things which undermines the idea of a full clean system install.

I might work for some. I read stories from people with a lot of problems after they updated this way. I would start out with a true clean install.

Those are good points, and a true clean install is the safe option. What I did is a compromise between the risks up a simple upgrade install, where SL just installs over the top of whatever's there (and which is where most people are having problems as I see on the Apple boards), and a full clean install, which takes a very long time.

I'm not arguing strongly that you *should* do it the way I did it, just describing an alternative. Which, incidentally, resolved some irritating issues for me (not FCS-related).

It's a side issue, but I don't think the new SL installer helps. In the old days, you were given an explicit choice among the 3 install options (erase and install. archive and install, and simply install), which made you think for a moment about what you needed. SL doesn't make those choices explicit - it defaults to a simple install, and requires you to have read the documentation (how unreasonable!) beforehand to figure out how to archive or erase.

I think that that lays a trap for the unwary.

In the old days, you were given an explicit choice among the 3 install options (erase and install. archive and install, and simply install), which made you think for a moment about what you needed. SL doesn't make those choices explicit - it defaults to a simple install ...

Actually Nick, I think you might be misinterpreting how the new SL install procedure works. In "the old days" as noted there were 3 install options, but with Snow Leopard there are now only 2 options: Archive and Install (the default) and Clean Install (which you have to jump through a few hoops to achieve) ... what has been removed completely is the "simple install" as you describe it. The home grown method you're describing does seem to be a kind of forced manual "archive and install".

Hope thats helpful
Andy

sorry, double post

I'm not sure that we need to wipe out the boot camp partition on the same disk to do a clean install. I would consider erasing the partion contaning OSX a clean install.
I've said this before, but for most people its a great time to buy a new system disk. Keep the current disk as the backup. Considering the price of disks, the speed improvements over the last few years, and the importance of what's on the old system disk, this seems like a "no-brainer".

Sonnet drivers may work with eSATA cards
 

FYI, for those with dead eSATA cards -

I found some postings on xlr8yourmac.com that indicated that Sonnet drivers work with Snow Leopard for some Silicon Image sil3132 chipsets.

I installed the expresscard34 Sonnet driver and my no-name eSATA expresscard 34 adapter now seems to work fine. I've sent about 40gb back and forth to a drive with no problems.

I'll let you guys google this so you know what you're getting into. The Sonnet drivers don't work with everything.

Any solution to this besides a FCP upgrade?

Hey, sorry to take so long to reply to this, have been extremely busy the end of this year.

But I realized pretty quickly that since I can import AIC via iMovie why not try it in FCP...well it works. DV import also works. So it seems that only hdv is messed up. I'm using v5 if I hadn't mentioned that...and this is after 2 OSX updates now, still the same.

This allows me to still work basically the same, except that AIC takes up close to x2 the space of HDV (720p). I haven't seen any benefit of using AIC vs HDV in effects, rendering, exporting...not sure if I just don't have the application use for it? I'm not usually doing extremely high effects stuff. But looks like I'll be upgrading to the newest FCP soon, for this reason and for BD exporting
...until then I have 1/2 the harddrive space for all intents and purposes :(

Also, on the Epson printer, I was able to fix that by trashing the "gutenprint" driver and downloading and reinstalling the Epson driver on their site....so that problem was totally solved - like new...or like old rather.