Disclaimer: I will freely admit that I don't know want I am doing 60% of the time. I personally find it disingenuous (although efficient) when you read and online tutorial that has two steps but it takes you ten. So you spend twenty minutes digging through the comments sections to see how many other people had problems and ultimately solved it differently. With that disclaimer, I am documenting my own learning process as fully as possible. You may find it cumbersome, illogical, and amateurish, but as vast as the Internet is, you will likely never find it.
The plan for the weekend was as follows:
- Buy Leopard Family Pack
- Perform full backups of: iMac G5 and Intel Based Macbook (Baby J's Computer)
- Install Leopard
- Setup Time Machine to make full backups to External Disk
Buying Leopard was easy enough, but there was not education staff discount on the Family Pack. (US $199)
External HD Up until now my backup strategy has been to simple copy Documents, Music, and Pictures folders to an external HD. The Hard Drive that I had been using a 120 GB Western Digital Passport was too small for a full backup of my systems. I hoped over to Best Buy and bought a Seagate Free Agent Pro 750 GB External on Clearance. My version does not support Firewire 400, just USB and eSATA. The wife approved of the Espresso case with Amber lighting and it actually matches lamp in guest bedroom.
Disk Utility Using Disk Utility App, reformatted and repartitioned drive into two partitions. Each to act as Startup Disk and Archive locations for the two computers in the house.
RsyncX Simple RsyncX to USB Backup is slow. Slow to catalog. Slow to backup. It took 8 hours to backup 133 GB. A further study is definitely warranted and I just hope Time Machine is faster.
Notes:
Files are accessible.
Back to Disk Utility to verify the Archive Volume.
Disk Verified Ok.
Rebooted and held down the Option Key and the External Disk was not available as Startup Disk.
Repaired Permissions on Archive Volume and Macintosh HD
Things to try - Stop Spotlight Indexing http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/stopspotlightindex.html
Creating Startup Disk I tried to simply copy the Sysytem folder on to the Archive Volume. This resulted in the following error. In the spirit of full disclosure, some time ago, I moved the Library folder by accident and tried to move it back. Since that time then I have had permission and driver issues that have been regularly ignored. So this error is disappointing but not altogether unexpected. So with no Bootable Disk and unable to create a Startup Disk, but a full backup of folders and files. I needed a way to ensure I would be able to access the files and folders after I installed Leopard. A quick check of the Users folder showed me that I could not access the folders of other
users while logged in as me.
So I enabled Root Login. Logged in as root and copied all user folders to an all user backup folder on the external disk. Why? Because I do not understand file permissions and I was afraid I would not be able to recover all users folders if I had to rebuild the machine. FYI: It took a long time and was unnecessary. Once I attached Baby J's laptop to the Ext HD, it was able to access all folders on it. Demonstrating that I would have access to the data without changes any permissions or making special backups. Although, it still did not see it as a Startup Disk.
Actual Installation of Leopard It took just under 2 hours and was easier than anything I have ever done on a computer. I was hoping for more hassle or the need to tweak a few things, but nothing was necessary for non power user like me. It asks a few questions, which are documented in some many places I will not post link. I will say I did the default Upgrade Install, instead of a Erase or Archive and Install. I had already burned half my weekend in practical but luckily unnecessary backups.
Time Machine The time machine setup was simple as well. I changed my backup plan to keep going to and get a good backup using Time Machine. I kept the New External HD attached and used the partition marked Extra as the destination. I will use the WD as the backup drive to Archive the Tiger install on the MacBook before I load Leopard. I still need to come up with more thought out way of dealing with backups considering the additional computers in the house and differing OSes they run on. It took a couple hours to fully backup the system. I do not advise working on your computer during the initial backup as performance was okay at best. So I will have to do a full App compatibility inventory at a later time.
So, Part 1, almost done. I still need to figure out why I could not create a startup disk and test Time Machine. Baby J's laptop is next so maybe I will have better luck there.
Note on Documentation: It was my intention to use Evernote for this post as I am evaluating it as my default note taking program. I tried using Evernote, (review to follow) on the web, but it will not let you insert pictures and now I realize I cannot install the app on the iMac because it is for Leopard only. I have to start reading the fine print. So I used my old standby Google Docs, which works okay but you have to reformat everything to get it to post. Also, here is a helpful Mac OS screen capture post - Screen Capture Tutorial. I told you I knew very little.
