Apple Matters’ Leopard Pre-Upgrade Guide

Leopard is nigh upon us, but before you upgrade, you’ll want to get to know the new OS better. Here is our guide for upgrading/installing Leopard. True, you could just upgrade Leopard and be done with it, but I don’t know of any OS install that didn’t pose some problems. Luckily for you I’ll be going over some important pre- and post-upgrade tips.

Time Machine

One of the most heralded features of Leopard is Time Machine, a very useful and automatic utility that archives your data.

If you’re lazy like me, you probably haven’t backed up in a long time. Time Machine should solve that, except for one problem: I don’t have an external hard drive. So what kind of drive do I buy? That all depends on how your Mac is configured.

All Macs that can run Leopard have a Firewire port (but not all Macs that have a Firewire port can run Leopard) either in 400Mbit or 800Mbit flavors. Firewire dominated USB in terms of transfer speed. While advertised as 480Mbits per second, that speed is rarely attained, while Firewire maintains its 400 (50 Megabytes) and 800 (100 Megabytes a second) transfer rates. In this case, Firewire would be the preferred choice.

But if you have access to a NAS (Network Attached Storage), the speed gains would far outweigh Firewire 400/800 and even USB 2.0. All Macs ship with a Gigabit Ethernet port and Firewire 400, but not Firewire 800. Even older Macs such as the PowerMac G4s and PowerBook G4s had Gigabit Ethernet ports alongside IO options that wouldn’t be usable today due to massive bandwidth constrictions.

Gigabit Ethernet operates at 1,000Mbits or 125 Megabytes a second and is nearly triple the speed of Firewire 400. While Network Attached Storages will cost you a bit more just for the enclosures themselves, you can get a reasonably priced model that has multiple Hard Drive bays and even USB 2.0 or, in the rare case, Firewire for connectivity with older computers.

If you have a spare Mac lying around, Apple claims you can use that to backup your data.

You can designate just about any HFS+ formatted FireWire or USB drive connected to a Mac as a Time Machine backup drive. Time Machine can also back up to another Mac running Leopard with Personal File Sharing, Leopard Server, or Xsan storage devices.

Once you’ve settled on a connectivity option, it’s time to select what kind of drive you’ll be stuffing in there. Like I said, you have a plethora of connectivity options available. I cannot tell you exactly what drive will be the best for your needs; you’ll have to determine how frequently files are changed and how big they are. If you’re a movie editor who deals with files ranging into the gigabytes, the more space the better. If you’re the average home user, you probably aren’t frequently changing files or are doing so on such a small scale that a hard drive the exact size you’re running, or a bit bigger, might work.

Backup, Backup, Backup!

Before we access backup nirvana, we have to make a backup first. Any OS install can go awry and I’m very sure you don’t want to waste time dealing with the damage.

The logical thing to do in this case is to create a Bootable backup through CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper. My advice is to create a Bootable disk image of your operating system with only the bare bones, users accounts and the like. Extra data that will gobble disk space should be backed up separately.

If your upgrade of Leopard proves hazardous, you can revert back to Leopard quickly and either attempt an install again or stick with Tiger until you have enough time to upgrade.

This wraps up our pre-Leopard coverage here. As you’re reading this, we’re already buying and upgrading to Apple’s newest OS so you can expect a full featured review shortly.

Oh, and one more thing, if you still haven’t bought external storage yet but really want to test out Time Machine, you can read on for some recommendations.

D-Link has sub $200 NAS that supports two SATA hard drives. This D-Link NAS also supports RAID 0 and 1 plus JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks), which allow you to combine 2 or more hard drives into one combined storage space. Newegg Link

Western Digital’s line of MyBook external hard drives offer storage in a sleek form that actually resemble books and don’t skimp on size and connectivity options. Western Digital Link

For those who employ Mac Minis in media center like setups, smaller is better, and that is no exception to storage options. NewerTech’s MiniStack V3 compliments the Mac Mini’s design and fits in perfectly without much hassle. Although sold as an external enclosure drive and a bit pricier than others, you can purchase a Mini Stack with a drive built in. NewerTech Link