How can I prepare for Tiger?

[cscgal]

I currently have two 250 gig drives striped into one partition on my dualie G5, and running Panther. I have all of my software installed and configured, all of my files saved, and I'm very happy. I also have a 500 gig firewire drive.

What is the best way to prepare for Tiger when it arrives? Which of the following scenerios would be best ...Perform an upgrade over the existing operating system
Temporarily move all documents over to the firewire drive, format the internal hdd, install a fresh installation of Tiger, and reinstall all software
Temporarily move all user accounts, the Applications and Library folders over to the firewire drive, format the internal hdd, install a fresh installation of Tiger, reinstall all software, and copy the Applications, Library folders, and user accounts back (compatibility problems?)
What program can I use to create a perfect image of the hard drive and store it on the external firewire drive as a "recovery disk"? (Should Tiger give me any problems, I may wish to revert back to my fully-working Panther installation). Can I use Carbon Copy Cloner? How do I deal with resource forks when copying / moving system files?

[gortonsfi]

Good Lord woman, if you're hard drives were any bigger you could rent them out as apartments! :-P

[cscgal]

Are you making fun of my terabyte of maccie space, gortons fishstix? :)

[TheOgre]

Why not just image the drive onto your 500GB drive, and after the install, if everything goes well, you can delete the image (not like it would significantly reduce the amount of free space on your drive :)

[kc0arf]

Hello,

I am a big believer in the re-install of a new operating system, not "applying the upgrade". Reason? It is a great time to haul out the trash! And you run into the built package that works great in release C, and dies out in release D. Also forces you to keep track of your software installations, and inventory. It also prods the lazy to make a backup.

Now, had you partitioned the hard drives, your data would be safe on one of those partitions outside the OS sphere. I cannot fathom why you need a 500 GB volume... are you having some live database living on your box?

Each computer I build, unless the hard drive is absurdly small ( < 10 GB) is partitioned into 3 partitions: System, Applications, Data. That way, I can format System as many times as I might have to, and still have the other two partitions isolated. Granted, this will not save me from a physical hardware failure, but it gives me a lot of options of having a startup volume on each of those volumes. I can also very easily tell backup programs to "hit this whole volume" and know that my data is all in once place (I have also trained myself, and my programs, to save in this data area).

I think it is high time that you think about what you want your machine to do, and where you can place your data in strategic locations. Do you need those two volumes striped? What can you do for data recovery / reduncancy? For me, it is a RAID 5 on my critical things on the linux server.

Enjoy,

Christian

[gortonsfi]

Yeah dani! Get it together! You better go out and get another TB of disk space so you can do a full backup ;) Hehhehehe

But seriously Tiger is almost here and isn't it exciting? I think I'm just going to upgrade, yup, upgrade my single lone partition. And I'm prolly not going to back it up first. Backups are for sissies and people who want to keep their irreplaceable data, fie on them.

I'd like to know what Dani decided, or is going to decide, she's only got a week :p

[yellow]

I definitely agree that the "Upgrade" option is the last option to be taken. Especially since this is 10.4.0.

But reformatting is not necessary/needed and will only add time to your installation. There's nothing new to HFS+ that would require that you reformat for Tiger. There's a fairly high probability that some of your Applications won't work with Tiger until the developer releases a patch. So reinstalling them could end up being a nightmare.

My advice:

Clone (a bootable copy of) your current drive to your external. Do an Archive & Install of Tiger. I think you can get away with preserving Users & Network blah blah, but to be 'safest', you should just let that get archived as well. Move what you need/want from your /Previous Systems/Previous System 1/foo to your current install, and reinstall those apps that don't actually work (they will be untouched by an A&I. The only apps that are touched are the Apple apps.). Definitely takes some time, but less then a complete reinstall, and you learn a lot about the Mac OS X file hierarchy at the same time. If anything fails horrendously, you have the clone to boot from, as if nothing was wrong at all.