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Leopard, CCC Large Disk Image = Bad
By Derek | October 30, 2007
I installed Leopard on my PowerBook 15″ tonight. I purchased the Family Pack (5 copies for $199) at the La Cantera Apple Store on Friday, the 26th.
The install went perfectly. I did a complete backup before and then did a complete format and install of the new OS. I was running 10.4.10 before.
Actually, the backup gave me more trouble than the install did. I was using Carbon Copy Cloner, a great product, but I was using the new version, 3, that I was a bit unfamiliar with.
Normally, you do a complete backup to an external drive, preferably firewire, and this creates a fully bootable backup for your Mac.
Well, the new version allows you to create a “disk image” format file… I figured this would be great, since I’m going to be backing up several Macs (to install Leopard) before this is all over, and this would allow me to back them all up to the same external HDD.
After many, many backup hours, but no success, I discovered that there’s somewhat of a limitation on disk image files. There seems to be about a 60GB limit before they become unusable.
If I had only known this, I would have saved myself over 20 hours of waiting on backups! My PowerBook HDD was about 85GB full.
Apparently, the disk image backup is designed to clone Macs for computer labs, etc. In this situation, you would probably want to have a small image, so that it would fit on lots of different Macs.
Anyway, using CCC, and a regular backup this time (which took about 4 hours — using a USB external drive) it worked perfectly!
After getting Leopard installed, I proceeded to re-install all of my apps. Most of them I just copied from my backup — that’s one of the nicest things about the Mac, is how applications are installed by simply dragging and dropping — but of course, I had to dig through ~/Library/Application Support and ~/Library/Preferences for all of the other files that I needed. Not too difficult, if you know where to look.
Copying my data over was very easy, of course, since Mac OS delineates so well between “System Files” “Applications” and “User Data”. It’s really very nicely set up. Reminds me of an incident a while back, where I needed to re-install Mac OS on a system… but leave the data and applications alone. This is actually quite easy. Apple’s installer has an option called “Archive and Install” which just moves the previous “System” parts of Mac OS out of the way, and then installs a new copy.
I’m liking Leopard, so far, after using it for only a few hours tonight. I’m going to give it a few days on my laptop before I go installing it to the rest of the Macs in the house.
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