Member Avatar for Dani

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?

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Dani AI

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A concise, practical plan that fits the thread's points from , and : make two independent backups first (a bootable clone and a disk image), verify them, then pick the installer mode that matches how much “spring cleaning” is wanted.

Bootable-clone + verify: create a bootable copy of the startup volume to the FireWire drive with a cloning tool (Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper! are both used for this purpose) and then test-boot from that external volume (hold Option at startup or set Startup Disk). A bootable clone lets the machine be restarted exactly as it is if Tiger install fails. (bombich.com)

Disk images and resource forks: use Disk Utility to create a read/write or compressed HFS+ image (.dmg) of the startup volume (keeps Finder/metadata intact), and use the Terminal tool ditto when copying folders from the command line—ditto preserves resource forks and extended attributes on Tiger-era systems. These two approaches cover both a point-in-time image and file-level preservation. (flylib.com)

Install strategy and rollback options: Archive & Install is a middle-road that creates a clean System while keeping user data in place; Erase & Install is safest for a truly clean start but requires a tested restore plan. With a verified clone available, a full erase-plus-restore becomes practical and low-risk. (macworld.com)

RAID and partition notes: a striped RAID‑0 is fragile—backups must live off that set. For a PowerPC G5, format external rescue volumes as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) with an Apple Partition Map if they need to be bootable; confirm any clone by actually booting from it before touching the internal drives. Disk Utility/RAID and cloning tools can operate at the volume level, but verification is critical. (scribd.com)

Checklist: make a bootable clone, create a .dmg image, verify boot from external, note apps that may need updates under Tiger, then run the chosen installer option.

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Member Avatar for gortonsfi

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

Member Avatar for Dani

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

Member Avatar for 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 :)

Member Avatar for 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

Member Avatar for 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

Member Avatar for 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.

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