Upgrade -backup recommendations please

[budaboy]

I am fairly new to OSX; need some sound advice on my upgrade.

I have a G5 and just about ready to jump onto Panther. I currently have about 80 gigs of photos/music/vids that are sitting on my drive. Most of the photos are backed up on media, but music and vids are not yet. I dont have an external drive but just got an internal 160 GB SATA drive that has yet to be installed.

My question is what is the best way to back up my files. I want to install Panther on a fresh drive not on top of Jag. Can i just intall Panther on the new drive and leave the Jag drive as is, then transfer my files to the Panther drive later? Then initialize the Jag drive for the secondary HD. Is this the best way to go or do I need to start burning my back up DVDs now?

Also,

How do I back up my prefrences? ie. entourage, mail, safari/explorer bookmarks.

Thx

Buda

 

[Lz0]

Install the second drive.

Drag your home directory to it.

Do a clean install of 10.3 on the origonal drive.

When you have your new system up and running copy all of your files from the other drive to your new home directory.

DO NOT copy any prefs to your new system.

With stuff like email, bookmarks, ical or any other data stored in your library folder ONLY COPY the data files.