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The personal site of Jamie Knight, an autistic web developer, speaker and mountain biker who is never seen far from his plush sidekick Lion. View the Archive

Topics: Autism Development

Meet the new Cat: Leopard

In case you didn’t know, apple released a new operating system for their Mac computers recently. Its called leopard and its quite good!

Of course, as a perfectly reasonable human being I decided I would wait a few weeks. Naturally less than 16 hours after leopard hit the web store I hit the buy button.

A few days later, a shiny box, filled with shiny disks arrived. As my whole life pretty much lives on my macbook it was very important this upgrade went well. So I hatched (then double checked online) a plan.

Step 1: Backup. Backup. Backup.

I am paranoid. So one backup, on one drive was not enough. Luckily I have two external drives so I could put a backup on each. I had a drive which was bigger than my boot drive, and a drive which was smaller. So it seemed like a good Idea to put a clone on the large drive and put a 2nd backup of all the important stuff on the other drive.

For the complete backup, it seemed wise to go for a complete clone solution. With this in mind I went and downloaded myself a copy of Carbon Copy Cloner . This fantastic little application makes an exact copy of you drive in a couple of hours. As an extra boost this copy is also bootable.

With my clone made, it was time to think about the safest route for the rest of my data. With the other drive I thought it would be a good idea to use the iBackup app to grab all my settings and data apart from my music and movies. So with both a bootable backup, and spare copy of the important stuff, it was time to give the upgrade a go.

Step 2: The leopard Awakes.

(i)Backup in hand, it was the time to press the magic button and unleash the leopard. So, I stepped through the menus, Making sure to select “erase and install� and the next thing I knew it was verifying the disk and getting ready to go. At this point I got a phone call from alun rowe over at pentangle . This was two things. 1, well timed and 2, interesting.

So while leopard was installing, I was talking on the phone. Almost an hour later alun got home, and I had a new OS. I selected my options and the install was done.

After doing this I created a new account and the machine let me in for the first time. I was up and running. I didn’t have to make this account, but I though it was possibly a good idea to do this just in case the account migration process went wrong.

Step 3: Migration Assistant

So, with leopard up and running it was time to import my user account. To do this I plugged in the external drive with my clone on. I then went to the utilities folder and started the Migration Assistant. I then selected my user to important and the migration was done.

So, the total time for this upgrade was just short of 2 hours. I had a couple of problems with migrating my data (you have to select the internel volumes option on Migration Assistant) and an it took me longer than expected to set up my modem. However, as my HSDPA modem is not that common I do not see this as an issue.

Overall the upgrade has been great, some of the new features are well worth the time and cost to upgrade. There are tons of clever new things but thats another post another day!

Published: 31 October 2007 | Categories: , Permalink

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