With Apple’s release of Mac OS X Leopard 10.5 on Fri 26th, I eagerly awaited the FedEx delivery to work on Friday morning. That night was I able to kick-off the full backup of my home MacBook Pro (26GB of iTunes content, where’d that come from?) and awake on Saturday morning to start a clean install.
I choose the clean install root to be guaranteed a fresh start and clean-out any of the ‘messing around’ I’ve been performing over the past year. Who knows what I’ve screwed up. The install was quick, smooth and easy. One thing that makes moving to a new Mac really simple is .Mac. I have a single .Mac account specifically to keep my home MacBook Pro and work MacBook Pro in-sync with regards to Mail, Address Book, iCal, Bookmarks, YoJimbo and shared junk in iDisk. As part of the Mac OS installation process you’re asked if you have a .Mac account. I entered the details and once the install was complete, fired of a .Mac sync. Minutes later my core applications were configured and all the data added in. Next was to install a slew of lesser used applications.
With such a smooth experience I moved onto my wifes MacBook. She doesn’t use .Mac and her email is POP, so my first concern was how to perform a clean install and be able to revive all her email. Thankfully Mail provides an Import from previous Mac OS X mail account. So I kicked off her full backup, run the clean install (removing all languages and other custom crap to save some space) and migrated over her email from the backup drive.
Then I realized iCal now supports a different data file format and I couldn’t use the backed up Tiger iCal data files. Since we share calendars, my wife uses xCal to publish and I was able to jump over to my MacBook Pro, export her calendar which had populated from my .Mac data and copy the .ics file over to her MacBook and import her data from here. Phew.. saved again. Safari and Firefox bookmarks were easy as were most other program settings by just coping across the Support Applications data and Preference files.
So, after the guts of a day, I have both laptops up and running with clean installs and no hiccups. Thank you Apple!
WTF? Okay, so I’m really impressed with Leopard overall and the installation and migration process was a breeze. But now I’m pissed. One of the biggest features I’ve been excited about most with the move to Leopard is Time Machine. So after following all the beta testing reviews over the past few months, I ordered the Iomega 500GB USB drive with Leopard from Apple’s online store to hookup to our Airport Extreme for wireless Time Machine backup.
