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How are you prepping for the Lion upgrade?

I'm taking a wait and see approach. This is a large endeavor for Apple, to not only release a version of the OS with many changes, but to put so many users in the cloud all at once.

If my Macs were exclusively for home use, that would be one thing, but they are not. I use them for mission critical work, therefore I am not about to take any significant risks.
 
labaom said:
I am not preparing. Everything about Lion is bad. I don't mind useless new features. But I mind when I cannot resume the same productivity as in Snow Leopard. Mission Control ruined how I use my gestures and expose. I never use spaces so why would I want to see it? Also, it runs very hot on my Macbook. Overall the performance is slower. Snow Leopard is and will always be the best Cat.
Click to expand...

Because Lion doesn't fit your needs doesn't make it a bad operating system, which is the feeling people will get from your post. I've been running the GM as well (as I assume you have been) and it's been pretty rock solid. Yes we didn't see that many new features even though Apple touts 250 of them. Like any new thing, you must give yourself time to adapt. If you never use spaces then you never see them, I'm confused as to where you think you're seeing them in mission control. You see the "space" for your desktop at the top of the screen, but there is no pressure to add new spaces unless you run a full screen app. I'm assuming that you haven't used a full screen app since there aren't any of them out yet and you seem to hate the entire idea of them. Keep in mind that you are going from a .8 release to a beta release and that would cause your performance to be slow. Snow Leopard is a great operating system without a doubt. I love it and was glad I updated when it was released. For gestures I believe Better Touch Tool still works in Lion so there's your answer.
 
I have bought a WD Scorpio Black 750GB hard drive for my MBP, I will be downloading Lion and then burning it to a DVD, swapping HDs and then installing on the new HD. I will then reinstall the programs I need eliminating anything I don't use any longer. Once I have it up and going on my MBP without issues I will be deploying it to the other Macs in the house.

If things go bad it will be no problem to go back to what I had before,
 
Get another portable drive for an additional bootable clone of what I have. Buy some good coffee beans for the day I decide to take the leap. Sit back and watch what happens for awhile. I keep changing my mind but these are still the components of Plan A.

Plan B. Similar, but wait a lot longer.
 
A *true* clean install:

Download Lion. Create boot disc. Save user folder to separate drive. Restart Mac with Lion boot disc. Reformat Mac drive. Install Lion. Copy files you want into the new user folder (leaving the junk out.) Redo settings and adjust to taste. Done. :)

I love this method.
 
maclaptop said:
I'm taking a wait and see approach. This is a large endeavor for Apple, to not only release a version of the OS with many changes, but to put so many users in the cloud all at once.

If my Macs were exclusively for home use, that would be one thing, but they are not. I use them for mission critical work, therefore I am not about to take any significant risks.
Click to expand...

iCloud isn't launching with Lion.
 
I just bought the Magic Trackpad for my iMac (running 10.7 GM) and what a difference it has made - it's the best prep I can think of for iMac users. :)
 
podsorcerer09 said:
Because Lion doesn't fit your needs doesn't make it a bad operating system, which is the feeling people will get from your post. I've been running the GM as well (as I assume you have been) and it's been pretty rock solid. Yes we didn't see that many new features even though Apple touts 250 of them. Like any new thing, you must give yourself time to adapt. If you never use spaces then you never see them, I'm confused as to where you think you're seeing them in mission control. You see the "space" for your desktop at the top of the screen, but there is no pressure to add new spaces unless you run a full screen app. I'm assuming that you haven't used a full screen app since there aren't any of them out yet and you seem to hate the entire idea of them. Keep in mind that you are going from a .8 release to a beta release and that would cause your performance to be slow. Snow Leopard is a great operating system without a doubt. I love it and was glad I updated when it was released. For gestures I believe Better Touch Tool still works in Lion so there's your answer.
Click to expand...

Mission Control takes Expose and makes it smaller and harder to use if you have a lot of windows open. This is because of Spaces being implemented into Mission Control (which I do not use at all). To me it is a waste of screen real estate so I would rather have regular expose. Thus I am staying on Snow Leopard.
 
Not prepping for upgrade in essence, but I'm creating a 50 GB partition for Lion onto my MBP's hard drive. That way, I can test drive Lion while still keeping things running with Snow Leopard. It would be easy to go back to Snow Leopard at any given time.
 
Bought 8GB from Amazon for $60 since the minimum recommendation for Lion was 2GB, which is what I have, and it would cost nearly $200 to upgrade it from Apple. Besides that, nothing much.
 
Before the download starts I'll make a Time Machine back up, restore disk permissions, use Clean My Mac, then leave the room while it does its thing. The download will probably take me an hour on my connection of 2 MBps.
 
Recommended safety measures

This is what I did.
I highly recommend this method as I estimate that around 24% of all new Lion users later want to go back to SL due to the paramount number of bugs and anomalies in Lion GM/10.7.0.

  1. Get hold of an external USB/FW disk which has at least the same capacity as the disk that is to be upgraded to Lion.
  2. Download the free SuperDuper! software
  3. Using SuperDuper!, backup the entire SL installation to the external USB/FW disk
  4. Install Lion on the internal disk
  5. Use Lion for a couple of days, experience the bugs and then feel the urging desire to revert to SL
  6. Reboot from the external HD prepared in above step
  7. Repartition the internal HD in order to get rid of Lion's restore partition
  8. From the external disk (which is now the running system), use SuperDuper! to completely restore SL and all your files to the internal HD

    Peace. ;)
 
siwsan said:
This is what I did.
I highly recommend this method as I estimate that around 24% of all new Lion users later want to go back to SL due to the paramount number of bugs and anomalies in Lion GM/10.7.0.

  1. Get hold of an external USB/FW disk which has at least the same capacity as the disk that is to be upgraded to Lion.
  2. Download the free SuperDuper! software
  3. Using SuperDuper!, backup the entire SL installation to the external USB/FW disk
  4. Install Lion on the internal disk
  5. Use Lion for a couple of days, experience the bugs and then feel the urging desire to revert to SL
  6. Reboot from the external HD prepared in above step
  7. Repartition the internal HD in order to get rid of Lion's restore partition
  8. From the external disk (which is now the running system), use SuperDuper! to completely restore SL and all your files to the internal HD

    Peace. ;)
Click to expand...
I went ahead and cloned my Mac to an external USB drive, using Carbon Copy Cloner. Haven't tried to boot from the backup (can Intel Macs USB boot?), but hey, at least I have two backups now in case something goes wrong.
 
wrldwzrd89 said:
(can Intel Macs USB boot?)
Click to expand...

Yes. After the "dong" on startup, just press the option-key to invoke the boot manager.

I forgot to mention that the "make disk bootable" option in SuperDuper! must be set before starting the backup.
 
Nope, everything I need is on my external drive (iTunes & iPhoto libraries etc) going to download from the App Store, create a bootable Lion disc, boot from it, run Disc Utility and give the HD a wipe and do a fresh install, lovely!
 
siwsan said:
This is what I did.
I highly recommend this method as I estimate that around 24% of all new Lion users later want to go back to SL due to the paramount number of bugs and anomalies in Lion GM/10.7.0.

  1. Get hold of an external USB/FW disk which has at least the same capacity as the disk that is to be upgraded to Lion.
  2. Download the free SuperDuper! software
  3. Using SuperDuper!, backup the entire SL installation to the external USB/FW disk
  4. Install Lion on the internal disk
  5. Use Lion for a couple of days, experience the bugs and then feel the urging desire to revert to SL
  6. Reboot from the external HD prepared in above step
  7. Repartition the internal HD in order to get rid of Lion's restore partition
  8. From the external disk (which is now the running system), use SuperDuper! to completely restore SL and all your files to the internal HD

    Peace. ;)
Click to expand...

never done a restore before, but is it not possible to

boot from SL dvd
when it asks restore from time machine backup
 
paulsalter said:
never done a restore before, but is it not possible to

boot from SL dvd
when it asks restore from time machine backup
Click to expand...

Yes. As if his 24% estimate wasn't completely made-up and unrealistic anyways, the method he posted is unnecessarily convoluted and time-consuming.

jW
 
Mal said:
Yes. As if his 24% estimate wasn't completely made-up and unrealistic anyways, the method he posted is unnecessarily convoluted and time-consuming.

jW
Click to expand...

cheers, cant see me going backwards, gonna wait a bit but when i move to lion i will stay on it

seems to me that many people are going ott about backup up and clean installs etc, reading many threads on here seem to make os x usage a lot more complicated than it is
 
My largest content (iTunes library and iPhoto library) run from an external hard drive. I will be doing a fresh install of snow leopard then setup lion. All docs, .ssh folder, etc.. I manually move over or restore from time machine backup.
 
I'm just going to upgrade SL to Lion. My question is after the upgrade is complete does the installer remove itself, or do you have to go back and delete the 4GB download?
 
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