iLife 06...playing on the safe side

[SeRgIo_42]

Hi all.
I am relatively new to the mac world (~ 1 year).
Thanks to your help, I jumped over the fence and life
has been easier so far.

Well, it turns out that my wife now loves the mac too (it
took months to convince her...but now she is addict to it !).
Indeed, she is the one who spend most of the time playing with iLife 05
and she definitely wants the new release.

I thought about upgrading but I want to play safe here.
There are people reporting some bumps (losing photos, calendar
crashing, etc) and I just want to avoid a major headache later.
I do not have iLife 05 disc because it came pre installed with my iMac G5.

Since I have an empty USB2 external hard drive, I think the best solution is
to create a image disk of the system before upgrading, right ?
How can I do this ? Can I boot the image from it ?

Any help highly appreciated,

Sergio

 

[Applespider]

You won't be able to boot from a USB device but you should be able to clone your system to it with something like Superduper.

The most important thing to back up is your iPhoto Library (you could probably pull iPhoto 5 back off your restore DVD if you really had to using Pacifist).

I'd suggest going into your iPhoto Library and making sure that the iPhoto trash is empty before you start. Photos that were in the Trash not being carried over properly into the new menu structure seem to be a common theme amongst several of those who had problems.

Install iLife 05 and then open iPhoto. It will take a while to open, convert and then build your Library thumbnails. Don't get impatient, don't try to stop it until it completes, it might take 30 minutes or so but leave it to do its thing.

 

[SeRgIo_42]

The most important thing to back up is your iPhoto Library (you could probably pull iPhoto 5 back off your restore DVD if you really had to using Pacifist).

I did not know that iLife 05 is somehow hidden in the recovery DVD.
If I a not wrong, someone told me that if I had to reinstall Tiger, I will
surely lose iLife 05.

Anyway, the backup idea sounds good...I do not intend to boot from the image
but instead I want to have a backup of everything if life gets complicated.

Thanks for the reply !

Sergio