Upgrading from Tiger to SL (pants pooping time!)

[gorby]

Hi all. My dear old intel Tiger iMac is my first Mac and it's been a love affair. Such a beautiful machine and it's never failed. However I think it may be just time for me to finally move on from Tiger?

I intend to do a 'clean install', what are the precautionary steps I need to take?

I have a OWC Mercury ext. drive-- is making a copy with Carbon Copy Cloner all I need to do? (does this save my applications-- i.e. photoshop, or will I have to reinstall them?)


Do I need to 'wipe' my iMac harddrive or will that be taken care of in the SL install process?

Sorry for the noob questions!

 

[wrldwzrd89]

If you want to wipe the drive before installing, you'll need to click the Utilities... button when you insert the disc, which will take you to the standard Mac OS X installer after the Mac reboots. As for your cloning question - yes. A clone of your system will be detected by Migration Assistant, should you wish to use that method for migrating your user data. That said, PS uses software activation, so... before you take the plunge, deactivate Photoshop first! Re-activate it once it's copied over.

 

[gorby]

Thanks for the advice and the photoshop tip!

 

[gorby]

Hi guys my copy of Snow Leopard is about to get here, so if you have any last minute advice, hints etc, please let me know.

Being as I've never done this before I'm still very apprehensive.

I should be safe as long as I have a cloned back-up right?

 

[Dave Braine]

I should be safe as long as I have a cloned back-up right?

Yes. If you're not happy with Snow Leopard, you can always boot form your clone, so that you can use your Mac as before, while booting into SL to try and sort that out. In the end, if you really can't get SL to work how you want, then you can always clone your clone back to the iMac.

I went from Tiger to SL on my Mini, and it all went OK.

 

[gorby]

Thanks again guys, made the big leap today, and so far it seems to be working good! (yes I'm almost surprised)

I didn't even have to reauthorize Photoshop, even though I deauthorized it before cloning

One issue I guess is I have an extra 'user'-- meaning you set up a user at install, and when I migrated my Tiger stuff over, it brought my old user too--- should I delete the new Snow Leopard version of... well, myself?




Re: Time Machine
Since this is obviously a new feature to me, I need some help!
(external = 1TB OWC Mercury pro)

1. I made a clone of my Tiger stuff before I upgraded, and now that the stuff seems to have migrated successfully back in SL, is it cool to delete it? I think I should clear this away (or not?) before doing anything with Time Machine.

2. Do you suggest making partitions in this external HD? The 1TB should be plenty of space considering my internal is only 250GB.

3. Am I supposed to just leave the external drive on essentially 24/7? (there's an on/off switch in the back)

4. Is there a setting to make TM back-up less often? I think it's like every hour, but I think every day would be sufficient?