I finally got around to upgrading my Mac to OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) last week. I did a simple upgrade on my exiting OS X 10.5 (Leopard) install. Since then, I have noticed that my system started throwing more and more beach balls. Today, I finally got a chance to sit down and do what I wanted to do from the get go — a clean install of 10.6 Snow Leopard.
First thing first, I started backing up all my data to my external 1 terabyte drive. After about 15 25 minutes of backing up about 30 gigabytes of information, I threw in my Snow Leopard DVD and restarted my Mac.
I was greeted with the OS X install screen. I went into Disk Utility and erased my main HD. Once the drive was erased, I initiated the Snow Leopard install. The install took about 20 minutes, after which my machine rebooted. After grooving out to the OS X ‘Welcome’ movie, I started the setup process of my new, fresh Snow Leopard install. I had anticipated starting off fresh, and migrating all my data from the backup I had made that was now residing on my terabyte drive. This is when I was pleasantly surprised.
After the initial setup, I was greeted with the data migration screen. This is where it asks if you want to transfer settings from another Mac. Low and behold there was an option to restore settings, files, and applications from a Time Machine backup. I grinned like a kid who just snuck a pre-dinner cookie. I had it restore my information from my latest Time Machine back, which was less than an hour old. After 30 minutes of restoration, I was greeted with my desktop. By ‘my desktop’, I mean my EXACT desktop that I had before I erased my HD. Everything was there. All my applications were there, all my files in my home folder, my screen saver settings, my dock icons, etc. I was impressed!
In about an hour’s time, I had wiped my hard drive, installed a clean copy of Snow Leopard, and restored all my settings, files, and applications, making my computer look exactly as it did before the erasure. And under the hood, I now have all of the benefits of the new Snow Leopard code, without any remnants of Leopard mucking things up.
Why am I making a big deal out of this? Because this sort of thing simply does not exist in the Windows world I came from. When I have to wipe the HD and reinstall everything on my PC, I’m looking at a sold 3-4 days of work to get it about 80% of where it was before the wipe. With Apple, it took an hour.
