Need complete details for SL upgrade

[BlueThursday]

I was certain that this would have been covered but I can't find a previous thread that covers it.

I have PT 8.0.3 (no CS) running on Leopard 10.5.8, works fine. I have the disc for Snow Leopard but have no idea how to back up the hard drive in case something goes wrong. I have two additional internal hard drives, both 1 TB, and one could easily hold the size of the main system drive. I could just do the simple upgrade and put SL overtop of Leopard but have heard stories about bad results from that, some though have been fine.

So pretend that I know nothing about backing up a hard drive on a Mac (actually no pretending needed) and walk me through the process. Obviously I'm fairly new to Mac, got the Mac Pro a year ago and haven't had to do an OS upgrade yet.

[bmcoonan]

Here is a thread that I started that has some info in it that might help. I haven't done the upgrade as of yet however.

I want to really bad, but, the people that say "if it's workin, leave it alone" about PTLE got me all nervous! Right now, everything works great on my system.

Brian

[Dism]

Time Machine.

Very simple. Completely idiot proof. Just open it up, say which drive you want to back up, and which you want to back up to. You can back up right away, or on a schedule. Something you should do ANYWAYS, even if not upgrading. Especially your sessions drive.

Also very easy to recover from. If you use an external, it's brutally easy. Just boot from an OS disk, plug in your external, select recover from time machine, and let it go. No need to install the OS first, either.

As far as SL goes... as it's been said before, if it ain't broke...

Been using 10.5.8 and 8.0.1cs1 since they've been available, and virtually no problems. I don't see any real benefit to using SL at this point, and Leopard still works great with everything.

[flommer]

There is very little risk, except some possible lost time, if you do this:

Make a partition on one of your internal drives and do an installation of SL there. You will be given the option to import (migrate, whatever) all your files, settings and apps from your Leopard installation. I was lazy about not wanting to manually have to reinstall everything so that is what I did. You can also choose to do a "clean" installation of SL without importing anything, and then do all your installations from there. Note that in no way are you compromising your current working 10.5.8 installation. I still have mine as well, but I haven't booted into it for a couple months now. This is a major advantage of having a Mac Pro with it's 4 internal drives.

iMac and MBP users need to do something like CarbonCopyCloner, or perhaps Time Machine.. I'm not sure how Time machine will work over an OS update, so I would want a pure clone on a FW drive to recover from...