Upgrading, Part 1
Despite my previous plans, I found myself in CompUSA tonight, and ended up with my own shiny new copy of Panther. If I ever get it installed, I’ll post a few comments.
So far, this isn’t the cake walk I expected. The problem isn’t Panther, it’s backups. I thought this would be a good time to start fresh, so I planned to format and install from scratch. This, of course, requires backups. I’m pretty sure the only thing I need to backup is my home directory. My original plan was to pick up a firewire cable, boot my Powerbook into firewire harddrive mode, attach it to my PC, and copy my Home dir. While at CompUSA, however, I decided I could just burn a CD to make my backups, so I didn’t get the firewire cable.
Oops. Seems my home dir was over 6 gigs. That’s alot of CDs. So I thought I’d try Disk Copy, make an image, and copy it over my network. But still alot of data. I decided to omit my Download directory. This is where things started to get unpleasant. You can drag-drop a folder onto Disk Copy to create an image from that folder, but you can drop multiple files. This means if you want to make an image of everyhing in a folder except a certain folder(s), you must either move the folder you wish to omit before drag-droping, or create the whole image and then remove the offending folder. I tried to create a blank image to drop my files into, but it didn’t work. (I later noticed you have to specify an image size, default is only 10meg.)
I eventually gave up on Disk Copy. I tried connecting to my Windows PC, and directly copying my home folder. After churning for a few, it told me it would take 3 hours. That increased to 6. I aborted. Later, I found that this was ludicrous… it was initially copying a bunch of small files, which gives poor performance, and extrapolating.
In the end (a couple hours after I started), I ended up getting everything copied, I think (hope!); I copied the bigger files, like music and downloads, directly, and made a disk image for everything else (what a pain). Once this was all done, I took out some extra insurance by exporting settings from a few imporant programs (Firebird bookmarks, NetNewsWire subscriptions, etc), and making an additional disk image of my /Users/jclark/Library/Mail.
Just to make this even more fun (for some definition of fun), I’ve decided to partition my drive fairly aggressively (OS, Applications, Users, swap). I’m authoring this entry from my Win2K PC while Panther merrily installs. More to come.