Dave Landers

I finally got around to upgrading my MacBook Pro to Leopard.

I generally take the opportunity of an OS upgrade to clean house, and I did it this time with Leopard again. So I made good backups, then did a clean install (not an upgrade). I then spend a few days figuring out exactly what I need from the backups and moving that over. This has several side-effects that I like. It cleans out the junk: old applications, prefs from apps I tried but no longer use, etc. It also gives me a fresh look at the new features, since they are not hidden by my old prefs or hacks.

Backups First

The first step is the backups. I have been using a script (fired from a calendar item) for a while now to backup (via rsync) some critical pieces of my home directory to the Linux box in my office. But that just wasn’t going to cut it for an OS upgrade. I wanted a full, bootable backup of the entire machine.

I got a USB drive and formatted it the same as my main drive (Mac OS Extended Journaled).Then, open Get Info on the drive and uncheck the Ignore Ownership on this drive (at the bottom).Then, use rsync to do a full backup. This will take quite a while, and works best if you close everything (ilke Mail, etc) first.

# turn off spotlight first
sudo mdutil -i off /Volumes/BackupDrive
# backup everything
sudo rsync --one-file-system --recursive --links --perms --times --group --owner --extended-attributes --verbose --progress --delete / /Volumes/BackupDrive
# turn off spotlight again, since we just dropped new index files over there
sudo mdutil -i off /Volumes/BackupDrive

I’m not sure how necessary the spotlight thing is, but I didn’t like all the backup versions of apps and stuff showing up in Spotlight searches.

Next, you need to make the drive bootable:

sudo bless --folder /Volumes/BackupDrive/System/Library/CoreServices

Great - now for the part that most people skip: Test the backup! I shut down the machine, then rebooted holding the Option key. I booted with the USB drive, and checked that everything looked OK. So now I know that if something goes drastically wrong with the upgrade, I can at least get some work done.

Planning

The next step, since I was doing a clean install, was to make a few notes. I scratched out a list of the files I needed, another list of apps and settings that I used every day, and another list of apps, settings, and other things that I wasn’t sure about. Then I spent a few minutes making sure I had links to installers, notes containing license keys, etc.

I also exported backups of things like Address Book, iCal, Safari bookmarks, Mail, and Keychain.

Install

I only encountered one hiccup in my plan. I knew I was going to do a full new install, but I also plan to do an upgrade or archive install at home (to preserve the sanity of my wife and kids). So I was going to try these first on my laptop, then blow everything away and do my clean install.

So I waited forever for the install DVD to verify (don’t need to do that again, thankfully), then proceeded with an upgrade install. But the progress bar was telling me it would take around 4 hours. I didn’t have 4 hours to blow on this experiment, so I bailed out and just went straight to the clean install.

ReCreate

The recreation of my “stuff” went pretty smoothly. I went through my checklist and started copying files, apps, and settings. I did this one at a time, just to keep things clean. For Mail, I did migrate over my old mail forders, accounts, and preferences - but then made sure to go check out the new prefs to see what’s new and what I might want to change.

Right away, I got Mail, Adium, iCal, NetNewsWire and Eclipse set up. Couldn’t wait on those. But other apps are being moved over on a slower pace. I don’t want them just because I used to use them - I want to make sure I really need them.

Impressions

Things seem a bit faster. I’m not sure if it’s just that I have not (yet) bogged the thing down with hacks, or if Leopard is actually a bit zippier. Or maybe it’s the new eye-candy acting as a sort of endorphin or whatever.

I’ll blog other impressions of new feature “likes and gripes” later.

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