[NeXTLoop]

Mods, please delete this post if it moves into forbidden territory.

When Jag came out, a lot of people found they got better performance if they did an Archive and Install instead of a straight upgrade. What's the verdict with Panther? Has anyone noticed any disadvantage to doing a straight upgrade? Any advantage to an Archive and Install, or an Erase and Install?

[Mac007]

I think the advantage of archive and install is it makes it easier to revert to your previous version of OS X if you don't like the new version.

[alpha rays max]

I didn't notice any particular problems with just upgrading to Jaguar. But, yeah, I've heard from so many people on these forums that it's better to start with a clean install.

I guess that makes some sense, but I don't know what the actual reasoning is behind it exactly, aside from no chance of having something left behind that shouldn't be there.

[NeXTLoop]

Originally posted by alpha rays max:
I didn't notice any particular problems with just upgrading to Jaguar. But, yeah, I've heard from so many people on these forums that it's better to start with a clean install.

I guess that makes some sense, but I don't know what the actual reasoning is behind it exactly, aside from no chance of having something left behind that shouldn't be there.

I think that's the main thing. It's a lot more work for an installer to try to figure out what files, out of 10's of thousands, need to be changed, modified, or deleted. It's a lot easier to simply install the necessary files in a clean install. Basically, there's a lot less that can go wrong or get overlooked.

Just as a small example, I was setting up a brand new iBook for my niece about a year ago. It came with 10.1 pre-installed, but with a Jag update CD. When I updated, you couldn't change some of her login preferences, such as the login picture. The entire option was greyed out. Obviously that's a VERY small issue, but it made me wonder what else might have been missed. I used my full copy of Jag to do a clean install on her machine, and it worked like a charm with no "broken" features.

I was really hoping to not have to reinstall, as I just got my new 17" PB and have just finished setting it up the way I want. Oh well, I guess the advantages of a clean install outweigh the few hours it will take...

[Angus_D]

With pre-releases it's normally better practice to wipe your partition that you have set aside for installing pre-release software for testing & development purposes, and do a clean install. But then, you know that, right? Right?

[Simon]

Some people here like to start from a 100% clean and fresh install. But many are afraid of the "work" they think is necessary to copy back all their apps, docs, prefs, etc.

I believe it is actually very simple to do and can be accomplished by everybody. All you need are two little tools: CCC and Terminal.

Just let me quickly give you a step by step guide of how to do a fresh install without loosing anything in 10 minutes.

1. Do a full backup of your old partition with CCC to another partition.

2. Boot from the System CD or DVD. Format your old partition.

3. Install a new OS. Install any additional apps from the CD or DVD you would like. The images to install them are normally found on the root level of the system CD or DVD in a directory called .images. It is invisible, but you can navigate there with the Terminal. Once you see the image of an app you'd like to install just use the open command to get the window in the Finder, like

Code:
cd /Volumes/System\ Restore\ DVD/.images
ls -al
open AppleWorks.dmg

4. Create all the user accounts you had on the old system. They don't have to have the same name, but they can.

5. Start copying back your old stuff with the Terminal. You can do this logged in as any user for all the users you'd like as long as you have an admin password.

Here's an example how to get back the entire user environemtn for a user called "joe" and a backup partition called "Backup":

Code:
sudo ditto -rsrcFork /Volumes/Backup/Users/joe /Users/
sudo chown -R joe:staff /Users/joe

That would give joe his whole original user space back. With all his documents, prefs, files, etc.

Some people could argue that the Library prefs shouldn't be copied back because they will overwrite the new setting files that were put their during the install. Well, if you're concerned about that copy back user folders as required and don't copy the user's library folder. Here's an example how to get back documents, music and movie files for user "joe":

Code:
sudo ditto -rsrcFork /Volumes/Backup/Users/joe/Documents /Users/joe/
sudo ditto -rsrcFork /Volumes/Backup/Users/joe/Music /Users/joe/
sudo ditto -rsrcFork /Volumes/Backup/Users/joe/Movies /Users/joe/
sudo chown -R joe:staff /Users/joe/Documents
sudo chown -R joe:staff /Users/joe/Music
sudo chown -R joe:staff /Users/joe/Movies

Of course you'd probably also like to get back your old custom installed apps. Here's an example for the internet browser Camino installed in the applications folder and for FileBuddy installed in the utilities folder (let's assume the admin of the computer is called "Moe"):

Code:
sudo ditto -rsrcFork /Volumes/Backup/Applications/Camino /Applications/
sudo ditto -rsrcFork /Volumes/Backup/Applications/Utilities/FileBuddy /Applications/Utilities/
sudo chown -R moe:admin /Applications/Camino
sudo chown -R moe:admin /Applications/Utilities/FileBuddy

Once, you've done that you should log out and back in a everything should be the way it was before. There are some nasty programs that really require an installer (I have one that installs a couple of kernel extensions and a GUI front-end plus runs some command-line scripts) so maybe it's best to re-install those by hand, but their prefs can still be copied from the backup partition.

That way, you can have a totally fresh and clean system without loosing all your settings in about 10 minutes. No hassle at all. Have fun!