Ready for Leopard?

So the time has come for a new version of Mac OS X. I installed Tiger on my Macs on the release date of April 29, 2005 just as I installed Panther on its release date. If all goes as planned I'll be installing Leopard on at least 3 Macs on Friday. I've been very happy with Tiger just as I was happy with Panther and Jaguar. Apple has done a tremendous job with the OS X series. Each new cat comes with stability, increased speed, and a variety of new features and refinements. I have little doubt that Leopard will be the same.

At home I'll be installing on three Macs. I'll be doing an "archive and install" on my G4 Mac Mini and my trusty old 12" PowerBook which now serves as a backup to my primary work machine, a MacBook Pro. I almost always use the archive and install option when installing a new version of OS X as it installs a completely fresh OS and moves the old system to a folder rather than an upgrade which goes through the current install and updates the current files in place. I'd rather start with a completely new install. The great thing about archive and install is that it keeps your third party applications intact as well as all of your user settings and files.

Another install option is the clean install which completely wipes the drive, erasing all data and then installing the new system. I rarely use this option but my MacBook Pro will get the special treatment this time around. Why? Over the past year I've used it to back up over 200 dvds and convert them to h264 encoded QuickTime files. I've also built up a 15 GB Aperture library and 15 GB music library. That's alot of disk usage, far more than most of my Macs have seen in the past and I think its worth the time to go ahead and wipe the drive. I use SuperDuper to back-up my home directory so bringing my new install up to date with my personal data and preferences will be a breeze. I'll use the opportunity to thin out the applications that I no longer use.

I generally do not worry too much about disk fragmentation as OS X does its own file defragmentation via processes such as "hot file adaptive clustering" which works primarily with smaller files when they are opened and saved. However, if you consistently work with larger files such as video files fragmentation may become an issue. You can learn more via this Apple doc.

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