Filed under: Snow Leopard
Getting Ready for Snow Leopard: Installation Options, Backups, and What To Buy
We're mere hours away from Snow Leopard's arrival tomorrow. As an upgrade for Leopard users, there have been many questions about how it can be installed. How will Apple enforce this "Leopard users only" requirement? Will they ask you to insert your Leopard DVD, or just check for a Leopard installation on your current hard drive? [There's a hint from Walt Mossberg that this Leopard requirement may be a little bit lax.]
Users who have installed beta versions report that they have been able to do an "Erase and Install" of Snow Leopard, meaning that you can erase your old installation of Mac OS X if you wish to start "fresh" with Snow Leopard.
The biggest question is this: what happens in, say, six months, when you decide that you'd like to reinstall Snow Leopard, or install it onto a newly formatted drive? Will you have to install Leopard and then install Snow Leopard over it? We certainly hope not, and have heard some reports that suggest you won't have to do this, but nothing will be official until we can test Snow Leopard for ourselves.
What are your installation options? The cheapest is obviously the $29.00 upgrade version, but there's also the $49 "Family Pack" for the multi-Mac homes. There is also the Mac Box Set which was recently introduced. If you want to upgrade from Tiger <del>(or earlier)</del> to Snow Leopard, this is your "official" upgrade path. For $169 you get 10.6, iLife '09, and iWork '09. This is also the best option if you want to absolutely guarantee that you can install Snow Leopard on a new drive without Leopard already installed. Several users I spoke with this week indicated they either have othered the Mac Box Set or plan to do so to make sure they have a "full install" Snow Leopard DVD. It's a great deal considering the "sticker price" of each, plus it's only $40 more than what Leopard originally cost.
Correction: Ryan Trevisol correctly points out in the comments that all Intel Macs shipped with Tiger, so there is no "or earlier" regarding Snow Leopard upgrading.
This is a good time to "go legit" as a Mac user. Maybe you bought the singler-user install disc for Leopard and over the course of time it happens to have found its way onto more than one Mac in your house. Maybe something similar happened with iWork and/or iLife. Well, for $230 you can get a "Family Pack" of the Mac Box Set, which will give you the right to install Snow Leopard, iWork, and iLife on up to five computers that you own. Amazon had just recently dropped their price to $200 for the Mac Box Set Family Pack with Snow Leopard. I don't think there's ever been a less-expensive time to get "legit" with all your Apple installations. Every Mac user I know appreciates not having to jump through the hoop of entering in a "Product Key" when installing OS X or iLife/iWork from a DVD. Supporting Apple by buying licenses for all your computers is doing your part to encourage Apple not to go down the path of product activation (although I can't imagine Apple foisting anything like the so-called "Windows Genuine Advantage" on its users).
While you wait for the hours to pass by, take a break from refreshing the tracking page for your order and make sure that you have a current, working (please note the key word "working") backup of your current installation. If you haven't already, this would be a good time to run CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper. A fully bootable backup is your best insurance policy against anything bad that might happen... but only if it works! After you update your backup, reboot your Mac while holding down the alt/option key, and boot your Mac from your backup drive. (Read more from Apple about booting from alternate drives.)
Did it work? Great! Unmount, eject, and physically disconnect the drive and set it aside.
Did it fail? Oops! Well, better to find out sooner rather than later. This would be a good time to figure out why.
Pro Tip: If you have an Airport Extreme with a USB drive attached or other external hard drive, download the latest versions of your favorite/most important apps. You can hook this to your Mac(s) after upgrading them and quickly update as needed. (This is probably more important if you plan to use "Erase and Install" but it's not a bad idea in any case.)
It's a good idea to keep an eye on the various Apple-related websites [ahem] and discussion forums to see if there's any widespread reports of problems. I know I can't probably convince any of you to wait until Saturday or Monday to see if everything goes smoothly (and I have no doubt that I'll be jumping in myself), but at least while you're waiting for the FedEx guy to arrive, keep a proverbial ear to the ground to see how all those people who rushed to the Apple retail stores are doing.
A lot has been made about the proper way to upgrade a Mac, and I won't try to convince you to do or not do anything in particular. One of Snow Leopard's new features is a new, streamlined installation process, where you don't need to boot from the DVD manually to install -- the installer tool takes care of all those steps for you.
My preferred process is a bit more hands-on: first I shut down my iMac (after putting the new DVD in!) and disconnect everything from it except the keyboard and mouse. I call this "minimizing the variables." Then I reboot and hold down the alt/option key and choose the installation DVD (you probably don't have to hold down the alt/option key but it shouldn't hurt anything). Then I go through the options very carefully. When I am installing a totally new version of the OS, I do an Erase and Install. Would Archive and Install work? Almost certainly, but I take it as a good time to do some "spring cleaning." Then I sit back and wait.
While the iMac is upgrading, I run SuperDuper on my MacBook (which is my work computer) so I know I have a very recent backup of it. If the iMac upgrade goes smoothly and it's working with my key applications, I'll upgrade the MacBook in the same way. At the very least I know that I have one working Mac, and my SuperDuper backup of my MacBook and iMac are the safety net beneath my wings.
It's an exciting time to be a Mac user, and I'm looking forward to Snow Leopard too, but a few careful steps of preparation today (did I mention to verify that you can boot from your backup drive?) can save a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth tomorrow.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
Joshua Ochs said 10:39AM on 8-27-2009
"nothing will be official until we can test Snow Leopard for ourselves"
Or, you know, various sites that have covered 10A432.
This is Apple, not Microsoft. It's been confirmed that you don't need any verification of Leopard to use Snow Leopard - just your honesty enforces it.
In the meantime, the installer changed drastically between the betas and golden master. So most of what you said up there regarding Erase and Install or Archive and Install - in fact, the whole install procedure - no longer applies. But people will find that out tomorrow.
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Ryan Trevisol said 11:05AM on 8-27-2009
There's two schools of thought on this.
The other perspective is this:
Even though the amount of time Apple shipped Intel Macs with Tiger (22 Months from January 2006 to October 2007) is roughly the same as the amount of time they shipped them with Leopard (23 Months from October 2007 to September 2009), the number of Intel Macs running Leopard is probably much higher than those running Tiger.
First of all, there's the up-to-date program which gave a cheap upgrade to users who bought in the time leading up to Leopard's release. I'm sure a high percentage of these machines have been upgraded to Leopard.
Second, Macs have increased in popularity and sales since Leopard dramatically. http://www.changewave.com/freecontent/viewalliance.html?source=/freecontent/2008/01/alliance-011608-PC-Round-Up.html
Third, Leopard sold like hotcakes. http://www.informationweek.com/news/hardware/mac/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=205100123
I think it may be safe to conclude that the number of people running Tiger may represent 30% of Intel Mac users. They're really not worried about that 30%. If they're willing to sell it to 70% of their users for $30, they're not counting on that 30% to make it profitable.
And here's the icing on the cake. If you skipped Leopard on your Intel Mac, you also didn't get iLife or iWork '09, which were Leopard only. So if you don't use iLife (I can actually understand this), and assuming iLife 08 works under Snow Leopard, you probably (see latest post on TUAW) use the $29 upgrade disc on a Tiger machine.
I honestly don't think the Box Set exists because Tiger owners HAVE to pay more for Snow Leopard, it's just that they won't get iLife and iWork 09 if they go the cheap route.
bob said 11:15AM on 8-27-2009
I think the way apple sees it is that if those 30 od percent cant be bothered to update to leopard they:
a) probably wont update to snow leopard and
b) the ones that may update probably havnt bothered to update ilife either.
Ryan Trevisol said 11:23AM on 8-27-2009
That's the whole point of my comment. They couldn't update iLife if they didn't upgrade to Tiger.
Ryan Trevisol said 10:40AM on 8-27-2009
Small correction: There's no upgrading from Tiger "or earlier".
You need an Intel Mac to run Snow Leopard. Those shipped with Tiger 10.4.4 and higher, and will not run Panther 10.3.
Upgrading from earlier than Tiger requires more than just the $169 box set.
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Binja said 10:59AM on 8-27-2009
Actually, I just upgraded my girlfriends Tiger MacBook. Worked perfectly. She loves it. I am envious of those who are making the jump from Tiger to Snow Leopard. Between the UI enhancements and performance boost it must be a great feeling.
Ryan Trevisol said 11:02AM on 8-27-2009
My post was regarding Tiger. The article said "Tiger or earlier." There's no "or earlier."
Sorry if I wasn't clear enough on that point.
Ryan Trevisol said 11:03AM on 8-27-2009
Crap! did it again! Panther! Panther! No 10.3.9->10.6 upgrades are possible!
TJ from TUAW said 11:21AM on 8-27-2009
Thanks for the correction Ryan. You're right. That was one of those passing thoughts ("If you're doing a clean install you could theoretically be upgrading from any version") but I hadn't even thought about the "All Intel Macs had Tiger" aspect.
I've posted an update to the article to clarify this.
Alex said 10:44AM on 8-27-2009
"If you want to upgrade from Tiger (or earlier) to Snow Leopard...." - TJ, the "or earlier" part of this is meaningless - everything earlier than Tiger is PowerPC-only, while Snow Leopard is Intel-only. I.e., Tiger is the oldest OS X version that can possibly be run by a Snow Leopard-capable machine.
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Asg said 10:48AM on 8-27-2009
Is there a reason to use Superduper as opposed to just having a Time Machine back up?
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timbo said 11:14AM on 8-27-2009
I'd like to know this too.
Kate said 10:48AM on 8-27-2009
I'm confused by SuperDuper! I have a 500GB external drive partitioned into 3 parts - (1) Time Machine, (2) Mac OS (for movies, large files etc) and (3) FAT32 (for my PC backups). If I install SuperDuper, can I just put the backup on my Mac OS partition, or do I need to reformat it first?
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nanda.firdausi said 10:52AM on 8-27-2009
Don't buy Snow Leopard's MacBoxSet
http://satukubik.com/2009/08/27/dont-buy-snow-leopards-macboxset/
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Anthony said 10:55AM on 8-27-2009
I wonder why apple didn't offer a tracking under "order status."
I am curious to see if If I will actually receive the package tomorrow.
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Larry said 11:15AM on 8-27-2009
Yeah I've been wondering that myself. I know my order has been "prepared for shipment" on Apple's website since Monday night. I know you can get tracking numbers for Priority Mail so that can't be it...
Well, whether I get it Friday or Monday or Tuesday really doesn't matter. Although a full weekend to check everything out would've been nice.
And I don't understand the point of using Super Duper if you've got a Time Machine back up already running... But each to his own.
PiperSon said 11:16AM on 8-27-2009
Because it's just sent by post rather than courier.
james.w.futrell said 2:35PM on 8-28-2009
If you check your order status on the apple website, they will give you an estimated arrive date. I know thats not exactly helpful, but at least you'll know the general timetable
Anthony said 3:12PM on 8-28-2009
I got mine today at 3:12pm!
Ditti said 1:13PM on 8-27-2009
If I make a bootable backup prior to installing 10.6.
And them do an Erase and Install. How do I get all my applications, docs, music, etc on the "fresh" OSX.
P.S. - have backups from time machine as well.
Thank you.
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