I upgraded to Leopard again – this time I did it the way I have always done it. Back everything up – blast the hard drive completely and then a fresh install.

I figured that some clever gadget would help me restore my home directories from my backup – perhaps I just cannot figure out newfangled gadgets. So here was my process – feel free to educate me.

Boot into the CD and run the Disk Utility

Make an image from my main partitions onto a USB drive – I did not really want an image – but it was all Disk Utility wanted to let me do.

Blast the main disk in my laptop and install Leopard

Create a new account called “csevadmin” as part of the install – do not create the all important “csev” account yet.

Once log in is complete, you are logged in as csev admin.

Make a new account called “csev” – make it an admin.

Still in csevadmin pop up a terminal window (finally a decent user interface) – Become root

sudo sh
cd /Users
mv csev csev.org
cp -r /Volumes/Blah/Users/csev /Users

Note: Using cp was a bad mistake – I reset all my dates. I should have read my own blog post and done this instead:

cd /Volumes/Blah/Users
tar cf – csev | ( cd /Users ; tar cfv – )

That would have saved my file dates . Ah well onward and upward. Once the directory /Users/csev is in place you need the magic chown command – which is now different in Leopard.

chown -R csev:staff csev

The “staff” is new – it makes a lot more sense than making a group for every user – but it is different. Also I now learned the modern “:” form of the chown so I don’t get nicked for using deprecated syntax every 18 months.

All in all I am much happier with a clean install – even though it took me hours to reinstall all the apps – I lost media for iWork06 so I went and bought iWork08 and I will need to go buy iLife 08 as well because of lost media – heck I need to upgrade anyways.

Oh yeah – and Time Machine is working – It was easy to exclude my Final Cut Express Documents. It did not work on the first try – but I went to sleep – in the morning all was better. I like that kind of software.

I have never really ever backed up my computer until now – thanks Apple.

Really cool trick with Leopard – Drag a directory into the doc and put an image in the directory named aaa-something.gif so it is the first thing in the directory – then the doc will see it and the image will appear on the folder – my rails_apps folder on my dock has the cute rails logo on it using this technique by naming the image aaa-rails.png

I am so loving the Rails and Ruby install on Leopard.

Plaxo still does not work – even with a fresh install of everything. I guess I will just book mark Google
calendar on my iPhone and give up using my iPhone’s calendar – too bad – Plaxo was sweet while it worked (4 weeks). Plaxo felt like such a Rube Goldberg contraption byways – it is not surprising that the wheels came of on on OS upgrade.

Luckily – Google Calendar has an iPhone view.

I will let the dust settle on calendars – if Spanning Sync releases a 10.5 version – I may just buy – it some things you should pay for to motivate folks to work.

Here is my holiday wish for Apple:

In the migration tool – Allow me to (a) mount disk images and (b) find the place where the old /User’s directory is. The current UI is too simple and does not handle the common case – it really wants to back up and restore onto the *same* computer – not an external drive.

Also – we need new operating system releases more often so I don’t forget how to upgrade my system in between releases. Next time it will be too long and I won’t even come back and read this blog post. And again I will be whining – but oh well.

Here is my New Years Resolution:

Since I am an AppleSeed Participant – I promise to test the upgrades for the next O/S – this last released I focused on testing the X/Server stuff – next release I will test the desktop stuff as well.