My copy of Mac OSX Leopard left Sydney on route to Auckland, New Zealand as of last night. I’m not expecting it to turn up until Monday morning due to living at a rural delivery address in New Zealand, though if I could order Leopard again, I’d have it sent to a friends place in town and make the twenty minute journey in to pick it up this afternoon.
However, I can’t go back – so I have the weekend ahead of me to prepare for Leopard. If it turns up early, I’ll be equally thrilled (but a little under prepared).
I have a few steps I need to carry out over the weekend before Monday morning before I can pop open the CD tray on my Mac Pro and drop in the install DVD.
1. Move all personal data currently on 250GB boot disk to 500GB internal storage drive. Then copy essential files to my 250GB LaCie external drive for safekeeping should anything go horribly wrong.
This includes content in my home folder, and application support files for Safari and Mail – along with a bunch of applications I want moving to the new system.
2. Burn a DVD with full application support folder from the Library folder. This way if there’s any essential supporting files to any application I forgot to copy over and need, I’ll have easy access to them after wiping the system.
3. Insert the Leopard DVD and perform a clean install on the 250GB boot drive. Once installed, I’ll boot into Leopard and spent a little time sorting my files back into their original locations scattered over the 250GB/500GB internal drives. The LaCie drive will be wiped and set up for Time Machine use of my Documents/Pictures folders.
4. Install Microsoft Office 04, iLife 08, iWork 08, eyeTV Hybrid software, and Parallels/Vista for course work.
The final step is to start playing with Leopard, and expressing my opinionated views here, on Macguide, and with a few videos.
Update: After some thorough investigation and a few phone calls, I’ve decided to perform an Archive & Install.
Applications are carried over, preferences and user accounts retained, and the installation of the core OS is brand spanking new: the same as if it were an erase and install. The user folder remains untouched. This will be a much more simple route for migrating to the new OS. The hours saved will be better used playing with the OS.