Upgrading to Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard
My experience upgrading to Snow Leopard was a positive one. I am a recent Mac convert (getting close to a year now) and this was my first time actually upgrading or installing a new operating system on a Mac. I had heard of several options from others on the net, including a straight upgrade, and reformat and reinstall, and many other variations of this. Coming from the Windows world, where you don't dare upgrade the operating system without a reformat, I decided to test my luck and go all the way and do a reformat.
I followed this procedure:
- The first step I followed began before I even went to the Apple store. This was to weed out the applications and user files that I no longer use. I did not want them getting transferred over to a fresh system.
- I started a time machine backup. I was a bad person, as it had been over a week since I last backed up my files. It had about 60GB to copy, so I decided it was a good time to head out of the house.
- I went to my newly remodeled Apple Store at the Galleria mall here in Cheektowaga, NY. It was nice and packed as you would expect.
- I got home and verified that my time machine backup had completed. I disconnected my external hard drive and put the DVD into my Macbook Pro.
- I restarted the machine, and I sat there as my DVD drive spun up and down for a few minutes. I was starting to get worried, and then the installation screen finally appeared.
- To reformat the Mac, you need to goto the title bar, and goto the utilities menu. From there you need to choose the disc tool where you can choose to reformat the drive. This should only take a minute or two.
- Once reformatted, you can begin the procedure as normal. It will perform a full install of Snow Leopard. It took about 45 minutes for me before it told me it had successfully completed.
- At my first reboot, it displayed the Mac welcome video. After that, I asks you some questions about your Mac. For the life of me, I can't remember the exact wording, but I was able to choose an option that said this was a fresh installation, and that I had a time machine backup.
- The system informed me to plugin my backup drive, at which point it scanned my time machine volume.
- It then displayed a screen with my user account, applications, and other files - as well as the disc usage next to each of them. This took a couple of minutes to scan, but it appeared to have found everything as the file sizes looked correct.
- I decided to restore everything. The application took about another hour to copy everything back onto the machine.
- Once it was complete, I booted into a system that looked just like my system did before I reformatted - my menu, desktop folders, applications, calendar, email, and all system settings were exactly the way I left them. I didn't even have to rejoin any wireless networks.
Overall, it was a great experience. The only problem I ran into was launching VMWare Fusion. I had to reboot one additional time for it to load the device drivers.
I have been using the system for three days, and I have yet to have an issue. I had had friends who have just performed the upgrade without the reformat, and they did have some small issues, but nothing worth not upgrading for.
