Leopard How do you plan to upgrade your Mac to OS X Leopard? There are many ways to get your Mac ready to upgrade, but only two that we recommend at Mac360.

Both upgrade methods involve an extra hard drive, but you’ll need that to take advantage of Time Machine in Leopard anyway.

First, consider that the files on your Mac, whether Tiger or Panther, are valuable to you, and losing them would be catastrophic. Think of it this way: how will you feel if you turn your Mac on and all your music files, digital photo files, movies, and documents are gone?

Anything as important as those files requires a backup plan anyway, and installing an entirely new operating system as complex as OS X Leopard requires an emergency plan. You know, just in case.

Second, Mac users are somewhat spoiled these days because OS X has been so stable and secure. It’s easy to get into a comfort zone and not worry about the inevitable? Inevitable? Yes, one day something will crash and all your files, or some of your files, could disappear than Britney Spears’ career.

Mac OS X Leopard comes with the strictest requirements yet for a Mac OS upgrade. You’ll need an Intel Mac, or a PowerPC G4 Mac, or a PowerPC G4 Mac with at least an 867mhz CPU. Also required is 512 megs of RAM, a DVD drive, 9 gigabytes of hard disk space.

To use Time Machine as your backup mechanism, you’ll need an additional (internal or external) hard drive. Other requirements are steep, too. To use all the features in iChat and PhotoBooth, you need an Intel Mac. Ditto for using Boot Camp to run Windows.

Leopard is the most complex and feature-laden version of OS X to date, so getting your Mac ready for the upgrade could save your some grief later. The Official Mac360 Upgrade Plan™ is deceptively simple.

Step #1 - First, make sure your Mac has an external hard drive (or, in the case of G5 or MacPro models, at least a second internal hard drive) to clone your current version of Mac OS X and all your files.

Step #2 - Second, check for the latest updates on other Mac applications and utilities that you use to ensure that they’re ready to run on OS X Leopard. The past week or so has resulted in a flurry of updates, so check yours to make sure they’re up to date, the latest version.

Step #3 - Third, depending on which backup utility you use, we recommend cloning the hard drive so you have an exact replica of your Mac as a backup. Again, it’s just in case everything goes south in a hand basket, so you’ll need some way to recover everything on your Mac.

We prefer, and plan to use, SuperDuper! as our backup clone tool of choice, though many Mac users will have success with the free Carbon Copy Cloner.

Step #4 - Fourth, choose an upgrade method. There’s more than one way to skin a cat, and some of the Mac360 staffers choose one road, while others choose a different path.

Recommended Upgrade Option #1 - For example, Ron, Bambi, and I will clone our Macs first, then erase the Mac’s main hard drive, then install OS X Leopard as a clean installation, check out all the fun features, and then go through the tedious step-by-step process of reinstalling and checking each of the rest of our Mac applications and utilities and files. That’s the long road, but often takes less time should trouble arise.

Recommended Upgrade Option #2 - This is Apple’s recommended method. Alexis, Wil, Jeffrey, Carol and Jack all plan to do the archive and install option first. Failing that, they’ll take up Recommended Option #1.

There are advantages for both options, but #1 is more tedious and requires you to know where to find your preference files from your old installation of OS X, and know where to move them in Leopard.

Option #2 lets Leopard do the heavy work. Leopard will archive all of your Mac’s files, install OS X Leopard, then copy applications and preferences from the archive back into the new version of Leopard.

Assuming all goes well, your Mac boots up in Leopard and all your files, applications, utilities are running just fine.

Either option could work flawlessly, or there could be a major problem crop up, so having that cloned hard drive backup is imperative. Regardless of which upgrade option appeals to you, Mac360 will do both and report on both this weekend, following Leopard’s launch October 26th.

We would also like to hear of your plans to upgrade to OS X Leopard, and what steps you’ll go through to ensure a safe and flawless upgrade. Talk Back to Mac360 and share your view in the Comments section below.

Check out the daily list of our 9 Word mini-Reviews at NoodleMac, and Kate's daily in-depth Mac software reviews at PixoBebo.

• Article by Kate MacKenzie • Published on Tuesday, October 23, 2007
• Category: Tips & Tricks • 6 Reader comment(s) • Email This • Digg This • Shop Now

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Talk Back to Kate, Ron & the Mac360 staff
Mac360 readers talk back. View their comments below or post your own comment to this article. Comments are moderated by the Mac360 staff. Or, post comments in the Mac360 Forums. It's mostly anonymous, there's no obligation, and no cost, so join in-- it's free, fun, low in calories, low in carbs, non-fat, and mildly addictive-- like chocolate and blondes.

Readers Talk Back:

JCS says:

Kim, glad to hear you are up and running!

The archive and install option is bad from what I have also discovered. It copies alot of old preference files which you may not need which bog your system down.

Also use some tools such as:

Macaroni: http://versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/16593

Cocktail:
http://versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/33453

These help you clean up things a bit…

The Macaroni removes language localizations which you don’t use that the leopard installation installs anyway, and Cocktail helps with extra system maintenance. With Macaroni in Tiger/Leopard, you can remove several hundred megabytes of language localizations that are totally unnecessary and just take up space and require defragmentation when you do system maintenance!

Good Luck!

— Posted on Wed Jan 09 at 12:21 pm by JCS

Kim says:

First, I did the Archive and Install option to see how well it would work. I spent hours trying to get my internet to work and noticed that I had a lot of extra files all over the place. Next day, I did the Erase and Install option. Man did that work perfectly! I set up my Airport Extreme no problem and within 2 minutes.

I am coming from Panther and didn’t have much crap on my computer to begin with, so the Archive and Install option should have worked great, but it didn’t. I don’t understand why they even give the option to Archive and Install...if you don’t want any problems and frustration....just do the Erase and Install...it doesn’t take that long to re-install your software and setup your preferences...it’s fun to go through all that again.

I’m just happy I can sleep again

— Posted on Wed Jan 09 at 11:09 am by Kim

JCS says:

Currently on my Mac with a Powerlogix dual 1 Ghz processor (originally G4 Sawtooth machine) I have a 2 Channel SATA card which allows booting from the attached drives. I have Tiger on 1 drive and on the other drive I have some applications. So, I will probably swap out the application drive and install another SATA drive to install Leopard on. Having done this, the Leopard install will be FRESH! And I can DUAL Boot to my original Tiger OS or the Leopard OS. I won’t have to clone anything since the OS’s will be on two separate drives. YAY! I will then have to figure out what to do with the applications--maybe I will put them on a different internal drive or external firewire drive.

For you macheads out there who still have a G4 sawtooth/digital audio/gigabit machine, you can add up to 2 GB of RAM (512 MB in each of the four slots in your machine) Only 1.5 GB was recognized in OS 9.x and since I discovered it, I started using the whole 2 GB in OS X 10.4.x!

Good Luck to All!

PS--I don’t work for these people, but ICY DOCK makes a great SATA drive firewire 400/800 case which allows you to mount your drive to a carriage and slip it into the case and lock it in place.
The case is solid aluminum, with radiative cooling so you don’t have any loud fans--the aluminum acts as a heat spreader/dissipater. One carriage comes with the case and you can purchase extra carriages for around $15. This works well if you do any archiving of large files without need for constant access. I am suggesting this for any of you looking to utilize Apple’s ‘Time Machine’ effectively. Currently I am using a Seagate 500 GB drive which is enough for what I do.

Links:

Icy Dock Tray: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817994038

Icy Dock Enclosure: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817198004

Icy Dock Website:
http://www.icydock.com/home.htm

Another good source for external drives:

Other World Computing:
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/

— Posted on Thu Oct 25 at 1:09 pm by JCS

Amazonian says:

Don’t forget Amazon’s S3 service for off site backups.

— Posted on Tue Oct 23 at 6:59 pm by Amazonian

bugsnw says:

On the home iMac, I’m going with Option 1, being careful to install the latest updates of all my Apps and Widgets.

On my laptop, I’ll go with Option 2 and see how it fares.

Option 1 does take the better part of a day, but it assures you have the cleanest possible installation. You won’t get to 10.57 wishing you had done a clean install.

I’ve seen iMacs running the latest Tiger, but with OS9 classic remnants lingering within.

The huge benefit is the knowledge that you have a clean install with no detritus from the past. Makes for easier troubleshooting.

— Posted on Tue Oct 23 at 3:33 pm by bugsnw

rmcellig says:

This is how I plan to upgrade to Leopard. This is how I have done it in the past and I feel that this time it is more important because as you said, Leopard really is a huge upgrade over Tiger (many under the hood changes).

First and foremost, clone your main drive to an external HD. External HD’s are not that expensive these days and beieive me it is the best route to go because you are assured that you have an exact clone of your main drive at the point in time that you performed the cloning. I have used Superduper for years. It is well worth the price to get a copy.

I will be doing an archive/install. It has always worked for me. Then I will make sure that everything I use often is working as it should.

As a side note, you might want to take a look at Mozy (http://www.mozy.com). They have just updated their software to Leopard ready. This service has never let me down. You can back up your important files using this service for less than five dollars/month. This means unlimited uploads/ downloads for this monthly fee. I had to recover some files I lost, using Mozy and it worked great.

I think that once you have experienced loss of data, you soon realize how important it is to back up your data.

I hope this helps someone in regards to a smooth transition from Tiger to Leopard.

— Posted on Tue Oct 23 at 2:48 pm by rmcellig

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