The Mac Way

There has been some media buzz in the Operating System space recently with consistent opinions and experiences of Windows 7 and the seventh release of Mac OS X making headlines. Version 10.6 or more commonly Snow Leopard has been seen by many as a service pack to the previous version and Apple have unofficially conceded this with a more than generous $AU39.00 price tag.

I personally got on board the Mac bandwagon in mid to late 2007 and while I technically received a copy of 10.4 (Tiger) with my iMac I took advantage of an upgrade offer on 10.5 (Leopard) and don't consider myself to have ever really used OS X 10.4 (Tiger). Almost two years on I'm very happy with the Mac OS X and recently performed my first clean system update. As a hands on technical type I followed the advice of fellow Apple geeks and instead of performing a simple wizard style clicking exercise I orchestrated a fresh Operating System install.

In a Windows based world the idea of installing the newer version over the older version is almost non existent so the typical upgrade path is to always perform a fresh copy. You typically copy all the files you think you'll need on to a spare HDD or neighbouring networked computer. You then proceed to format the drive and install the new OS. You then hunt down all the drivers you need for your hardware to work with the new OS along with regular software packages and finally copy back all the files from the spare HDD or locally networked computer. It's a long boring process and you are typically still changing default system setting to your own preferences weeks after the upgrade.

The Mac way takes the Windows way places a large piece of "get the hell out of here" down its throat and mercifully detonates it. While the full blown nerd way still comprises of formatting the drive and installing a fresh version of the new Operating System its the availability and simplicity of both third party and integrated tools that make the data migration process faultless. I'll concede that the process I followed was time consuming and tedious but I credit this to a fear of the unknown than to a problem with the process.

Outside of making a Time Machine backup (Apples own data recovery utility) I also made a separate bit for bit copy of my Mac's HDD on a bootable external HDD. Once complete I tested it by independently booting my system from this drive, seeing the exact files, application and preferences in action. Just for fun I even loaded it from my wife's Macbook Pro and it didn't even display a shadow of a complaint despite the underlying hardware and monitor resolution changing. I imagine Windows would have had a brain explosion at that point.

Once I had a working backup of my Mac; along with a secondary backup via Time Machine, I carried out the usual step of formatting and Installing the new OS. Now for the real magic once my install had completed I then used Mac's own Data Migration tool to start copying all the user settings and user data from my backup. In the end my old wall paper and all my system preferences where just as I'd left them. I was given the option to copy over applications but opted out of this preferring to install them fresh.

Brillant …