Rawr!
It’s Leopard Day, and I have a crapload of stuff to do. Unfortunately, I also have to actually do some work while I’m at work, so that puts a damper on my pre-Leopard preparations. I’ve got a number of things that need to be copied over to my external hard drive; the entirety of my user folder - minus some of the cruft in the Library folder, and the web server directory containing all of the files for the new version of DPWR. Plus, I need to do a data dump from the mySQL database so that I can retain all of the skin work I’ve done on the site during the upgrade. This is a not-negligible amount of data, so I’m planning on taking a slightly early lunch so I can get the file transfer underway as soon as I possibly can. Fortunately, two of the biggest offenders for space - my iTunes library and my iPhoto library - are already on the external drive, so really the biggest mess I have to deal with is the fact that I downloaded all 4 seasons of Mythbusters and haven’t moved it over to the external drive yet, so it’s taking up 84 gigs of space right now and needs to be copied over along with everything else. This sucks.
I also need to copy the applications folder over to the external drive; another exercise sure to take an hour or two. I’ll ultimately be lucky if I have any time tonight to actually install the OS itself, but by god, I’m going to try.
One thing that will help alleviate some of the tension is the fact that I’ll probably be out of the apartment most of the day anyway; if I start everything copying between 11:00 and noon, that’ll give it 4-5 hours of copy time before I even get off work. Two hours more before I can even acquire Leopard, and probably at least another couple of hours at Mac Odyssey for their Leopard launch party, complete with food, a live band, and the potential for freebies, up to and including a used Mac (great for Tiger, and fileserving!). That puts it at 8:00 pm or so, which gives me 8-9 hours of backup time. Not bad, but I’m still not sure it’ll be enough to back up the majority of a 250GB hard drive over a USB 2.0 connection. We’ll see. Mythbusters alone will probably take at least an hour, but that’s also an 80-gig chunk of space we’re talking about. I may just make it.
Anyhoo, once I get Leopard and make it back home, I’m going to be starting from scratch. A full clean install. I could very probably just do an upgrade and not have any problems, but years of bunged Windows upgrades and a recent bout of OS instability (i.e. rebooting at random while playing DivX AVI files, regardless of the program) have made me wary, and I think it’s best to just clean out all the junk and start fresh. So, bye-bye Tiger. It’s been a rocking awesome run.