Upgrade to Snow Leopard

Oct 30

I’ve been putting off the upgrade to Snow Leopard because PGP doesn’t support it yet. But last night my wireless card wouldn’t connect to my home network. I played with it for about 30 minutes, but I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with it. Rather than continue to hit my head against that wall, I decided it was time to erase everything and do a fresh install of Snow Leopard. The install went smoothly, as most Mac installs do. I reformatted the hard drive in the process, and it’s nice to have a fresh install.

Although I’ve written about it before, I need to give a thumbs up to Time Machine. Before formatting the drive, I connected a USB drive and backed up using Time Machine (now I had two backups: my regular, wireless TM backup and this USB TM drive). During the installation of Snow Leopard, it asked if I wanted to restore settings from a Time Machine backup.

The restore not only restored my data files, it entirely set up my computer to match my old install. This includes:

All applications, including app settings I’ve customized. Apps even open the same size as I last closed them.
Photos, music, videos, etc. (not only the files, but the setup of them in the different programs)
Login items, passwords, user accounts
Screen saver settings (even the ones I’ve added to the computer), desktop background, etc.
Email settings, signatures, sent mail, etc.
Wireless and other network settings and passwords
Web browser bookmarks, saved passwords, history, etc.

It took about 1.5 hours to restore my data and settings. My computer then looked as if I hadn’t done a fresh install. Time Machine is one of the best things about the Mac.

(I should note that during the restoration, I chose not to restore a couple of things (like database settings) because I wanted to do fresh installs of them.)

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Comments

Ben

October 30th, 2009 at 11:52 AM

Do you use Apple’s time capsule with time machine or some other external drive?
conan

October 30th, 2009 at 11:56 AM

I have a 1TB time capsule. When it first came out, Time Machine didn’t work with a USB drive connected to a wireless hub. But now it does. If I could do it again, I’d just get a cheap 1.5+ TB drive and connect it to any Airport Extreme. The time capsule is pretty overpriced.

It works really well (and fast) over wireless N. My wife’s computer is wireless G, and her’s is a lot slower. When we make big changes to her data, such as importing huge professional photos, we have to leave her computer on overnight to sync up wirelessly.
Greg

October 31st, 2009 at 7:56 AM

What is your impression of Snow Leopard? Is it worth the upgrade?
conan

October 31st, 2009 at 8:09 AM

It seem slightly more snappy, but other than that, I haven’t seen any differences yet. I’ll let you know when I have more time with it.
Tim

November 2nd, 2009 at 2:59 PM

I thought Macs didn’t have those problems. :) No, really, Time Machine sounds pretty sweet. When it comes down to it and you have to reformat, it’d be great to have that sort of utility at your side.

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