[ghporter]

My school just got Leopard in (at a better price than the Apple Education Store), so I have it in my hot little hands. Along with the lovely box, the computer store also gives out a sheet with instructions, including "how not to lose your data" via performing an "Archive and Install". Sounds good to me.

What else should I look out for, avoid, look for, and otherwise be aware of before I start?

[bearcatrp]

If you have an external firewire disk, would really suggest you use CCC to make a complete copy, then do a clean install. Then drag one program at a time to insure they work. Hopefully, the next update to leopard will fix more bugs. Some apps don't work so test each one. I am actually dual booting and running tiger, then play with leopard awhile to get used to it. When I think its ready, then I will run leopard 100%. Good luck.
Randy

[ghporter]

I'm doing a backup as we speak-over USB 2.0, but that's working fine for me. Not a clone (I'll probably do that too-I'm a "belt and suspenders" kind of guy with this sort of thing). Most of my apps are things like Office, Firefox, and a few other odd ones (I'm going to check with their site to find out if PocketMac works with Leopard...), so hopefully I won't have too many surprises.

[Sherman Homan]

Run Disk Utility, Repair Disk and make sure that it is happy. If you have Disk Warrior, all the better. The only problem I have had so far was a newish MacPro whose hard drive decided to die during the upgrade. So making the backup is "belt and suspenders" smart!

[ghporter]

For some reason CCC doesn't like the over 150 GB of space on my external drive-even though my OS X partition only has something like 35GB used. And Disk Utility refuses to make an image, saying something about files being in use... I'm "copying" my user data right now, but that doesn't at all feel like the backup I wanted to do.

[bearcatrp]

Use super duper then. Had the same problem on my mac pro. Once in awhile it would hickup, other times it works. Not sure why. Its nice to have a bootable drive if things go wrong.
Randy

[Simon]

Originally Posted by ghporter 

For some reason CCC doesn't like the over 150 GB of space on my external drive-even though my OS X partition only has something like 35GB used. And Disk Utility refuses to make an image, saying something about files being in use... I'm "copying" my user data right now, but that doesn't at all feel like the backup I wanted to do.

If you want to make a clone, I suggest doing that directly to a separate partition with DiskUtility (don't make a disk image, no CCC, no SD, etc.). This has always worked for me and I have not once encountered problems making a clone this way.

• Launch Disk Utility
• Select your current Tiger boot partition
• Hit the 'Restore' tab
• Drag your Tiger boot partition to the 'Source' field
• Drag the volume you will use for the clone to the 'Destination' field
• Hit the 'Erase Destination' checkbox
• Hit the 'Restore' button
• Go have a coffee; 35 GB will take a while over USB2

Good luck!

[OreoCookie]

I just upgraded my internal harddrive yesterday. Use Disk Utilities cloning functionality (you don't need CCC/Super Duper for that), worked flawlessly yesterday.

Edit: Simon was quicker than me, what he said

If you have any third-party (mouse) drivers, you might want to de-install them. (For one reason or another, Logitech drivers are problematic.) So far, I've never had problems just upgrading my OS (my user account was carried over from 10.0.3!).

Good luck!

[ghporter]

I'm finding that my external drive has "cleanup" issues. It's a 300GB drive with two partitions on it, one formatted for HFS and the other for FAT32-and I'd already used the Mac partition to save a backup of my MBP's user folder. So when I looked at copying a bunch of stuff to it, it looked like there was a bunch of room on it. I copied stuff and then looked at what was included in it (not everything was needed-a few disk images, etc., big stuff), and deleted the unnecessary stuff. Big mistake-no way to empty the trash that I could see and it now says that its 150GB space has about 15GB free. I erased the free space using DU, but right now it shows even LESS free space, so I'm going to copy my old MBP user folder backup to a different location and wipe the partition. Not at all happy about this.. (a bit later) On the flip side, erasing the partition took seconds! Back in business!

[ghporter]

So here I am, with my Mac partition fully backed up. I know that some have suggested using a clean install because Leopard isn't exactly "friendly" with all apps, but I think I'll go the "archive and install" router first-if things get bad, I can always go back and wipe it clean.

Wish me luck-I hope I won't need it.

[ghporter]

I'm back. Looks like everything went sldjfofg oi s fsdif g/lkdf ..........

Sorry, I couldn't' resist. It all went fine, and took a little more than 30 minutes. Thanks for the help.