Upgrade to Snow Leopard? What should i do?

[esadb]

Ive had my mac now just short of a year almost (blackbook, core duo 2ghz, 2gb ram)

Im running leopard on it, but what i wanted to upgrade to snow leopard in a weeks time. My question is i was gonna do a upgrade in order not to lose my files and all. What im wondering is can i make a backup of my stuff even if i dont have a external hdd?

What i was gonna do is make a backup and store i on my desktop pc (windows xp) and leave it one of those partitions. Or would be more beneficial to me to do a clean install, but i still want to get all my files back and my setup.

I guess im not quite sure how to do the backup.

 

[Razeus]

Ive had my mac now just short of a year almost (blackbook, core duo 2ghz, 2gb ram)

Im running leopard on it, but what i wanted to upgrade to snow leopard in a weeks time. My question is i was gonna do a upgrade in order not to lose my files and all. What im wondering is can i make a backup of my stuff even if i dont have a external hdd?

What i was gonna do is make a backup and store i on my desktop pc (windows xp) and leave it one of those partitions. Or would be more beneficial to me to do a clean install, but i still want to get all my files back and my setup.

I guess im not quite sure how to do the backup.

...well if you have nowhere to do the backup, how can you expect to do a backup?

So you have 2 choices:

1) Do an in place upgrade and keep all your files and settings (which is risky since you have no backup to rely on if something goes wrong)

2) Get an external drive. Load up Time Machine. Let Time Machine do your backup over a week. Clean install Snow Leopard and transfer your TM backup.

In other words. Get an external drive. It's ridiculous for people not to be using externals.

 

[esadb]

...well if you have nowhere to do the backup, how can you expect to do a backup?

So you have 2 choices:

1) Do an in place upgrade and keep all your files and settings (which is risky since you have no backup to rely on if something goes wrong)

2) Get an external drive. Load up Time Machine. Let Time Machine do your backup over a week. Clean install Snow Leopard and transfer your TM backup.

In other words. Get an external drive. It's ridiculous for people not to be using externals.

So you cant do a backup where it like takes a snapshot/image of your stuff on the mac and then you can restore it later if need be? And it just saves a file which you can then just save the another pc/dvd

 

[esadb]

so im guessing no one knows anything?

 

[belvdr]

You can look at something like tar. There may be a GUI for it. But, you still want to get the file off the machine. That's the whole point.

 

[devburke]

So you cant do a backup where it like takes a snapshot/image of your stuff on the mac and then you can restore it later if need be? And it just saves a file which you can then just save the another pc/dvd

You can. In Disk Utility, go to the Restore tab. Use that to copy one disk onto another. But in the long run, you're gonna be better off with TM, and externam HDs are cheap anyway. So you can do it your way, but I think everyone here would recommend getting a HD instead.

 

[fabian9]

So you cant do a backup where it like takes a snapshot/image of your stuff on the mac and then you can restore it later if need be? And it just saves a file which you can then just save the another pc/dvd

Yes, it's called Time Machine!

I wonder if you can get Time Machine to use an internal (partitioned?) hard drive to write the backup to?

 

[esadb]

You can. In Disk Utility, go to the Restore tab. Use that to copy one disk onto another. But in the long run, you're gonna be better off with TM, and externam HDs are cheap anyway. So you can do it your way, but I think everyone here would recommend getting a HD instead.

The thing in Disk Utility isnt that for if you have a disk image and you want to put it back on? Question is how do i create this disk image lol?

I was looking around disk utility and i couldnt see anything

 

[darkpaw]

Disk Utility... Select the hard drive in the left-hand list.

File > New > New Image from <your drive>

Done.

 

[devburke]

The thing in Disk Utility isnt that for if you have a disk image and you want to put it back on? Question is how do i create this disk image lol?

I was looking around disk utility and i couldnt see anything

1) Nope, it doesn't have to be an image, it can be just a disk



2) "put back on" is exactly what you want to do, although if you mean that you can only restore to your OS X hard drive, you'd be mistaken. You can choose both the source drive and destination to put the copy on to.

 

[esadb]

1) Nope, it doesn't have to be an image, it can be just a disk

View attachment 189794

2) "put back on" is exactly what you want to do, although if you mean that you can only restore to your OS X hard drive, you'd be mistaken. You can choose both the source drive and destination to put the copy on to.

thats exactly what i was looking for, and that makes a image of the drive that i can then burn to a dvd put on another drive.

Id get a external hd but i really blew a lot of cash this summer lol so i really cant afford another expense now right before university starting back up

 

[weckart]

thats exactly what i was looking for, and that makes a image of the drive that i can then burn to a dvd put on another drive.

Id get a external hd but i really blew a lot of cash this summer lol so i really cant afford another expense now right before university starting back up

So leave off updating to Snow Leopard until you get your finances in order. If you have decent upload bandwidth, you might want to look at online backups.