I just received Leopard for Christmas and realized I'm going to have to clone my hard drive if I want to safely install the OS. What would be the cheapest and easiest way to go about doing this? I have 110 GB of data on a 120 GB drive. I'm financially drained from holiday shopping, but I'm willing to lay out dat cheddah for an external hard drive within reason. Or would it be cheaper to take it into a computer specialist group? The only reason I am hesitating to do the ladder option is because I don't know how long they will have my precious Mac hidden away from me. Thanks in advance.
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Cheapest and easiest way to install Leopard
- Thread starter TheMotif
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You don't have to clone your hard drive to safely install Leopard. What you should have is a backup regime on the general principle that hard drives can fail. Once Leopard is installed, you can use Time Machine.
I think what they're getting at is you should have an external drive for eventual use with Time Machine anyway. But for now, clone your current HD to it or back up the essentials to it. Then upgrade/clean install Leopard and migrate your data from the external.
When all is set up properly, format the external drive and use it as a Time Machine disk.
As far as external drives you should be able to get something like a Western Digital MyBook for less than $100 for a 320GB. Cheaper if you look hard enough. I use a 320GB drive to back up my internal 250GB partition. Though, I only backup my home folder and my applications.
I don't use Time Machine (for specific reasons) but I only have personal data in Address Book, iPhoto, and iTunes. I realize that may be different in your case, but I export the iPhoto library to a folder on my external. I export an Address Book archive to my external and copy my iTunes folder to my external. That's how I back up my data. All the other stuff is on my external should I ever need it. I don't keep much on my internal HDD. Even my iPhoto photos are just iPod wallpapers for my touch.