My laptop had been bugging me for a while. I’m a Mac and Linux user so I may be shunned for this, but I was ready to do a clean install of my 1.5 year-old Macbook Pro. I had some leftover cruft from my previous job as well as several programs that just weren’t performing 100% correctly. So on Black Friday I went out to Costco and bought a 320GB WD passport drive and did a carbon copy of the internal hard disk. Five hours later I had a complete block level copy of my internal hard disk, fully bootable I might add.
I dug out my Leopard disk and wiped the internal drive and began to install… it failed. Problem with the DVD. Fortunately I had a backup copy of the DVD which installed just fine. One thing I neglected to do before wiping the internal drive was to make a list of what I wanted to install. This wasn’t really a problem, but I usually like to get installers and disks together before I start on this path. It’s been so long since I’ve had to deal with my nearly monthly reinstalls of Windows, I just wasn’t prepared.
All-in-all installing hasn’t been much of an issue. But as a web developer here are the “gotchas” I ran into:
1) I had been using Parallels to run my Windows environment for testing web pages with IE6 and IE7. Well Parallels just came out with a new version. This one says that it fixes all of the problems I had been complaining about for the past year. But since it’s version 4.0 I have to pay for an upgrade. So as a dissatisfied customer, I’m giving VMWare Fusion a shot and I like it a lot better. VMWare will most likely be getting my money when my trial runs out.
2) Adobe DreamWeaver CS4. A clean install is a good time to install the upgrade from CS3. Make sure you have all the information about the sites you manage written down. There’s no clean way to import sites you work on, so it’s best to set them up from scratch. I know it’s annoying if you manage a lot of sites, but there seems to be major hiccups if you try to transfer your old data over.
3) VisualHub. This is my all-time favorite video conversion program. It’s simple and just works. However, the author decided to stop supporting it and moved it over to the open source realm. Not entirely a bad thing, but now I had to do some manual setup and copy of old files in order to get it working as before. Glad I did a carbon copy.
4) Time Machine. I have one annoyance. It appears that when you do a clean install, you can attach your previous backup to perform restores, but the new install is considered a new machine, so you will basically lose your “history” of incremental changes. I’m pretty certain that I don’t need anything from more than a couple of weeks ago, but having that history has been great when a client changes their mind and want to go back to a previous version. I think I’m going to setup a subversion server in my house to protect me in the future tho. Time machine is nice and all, but still a little unpredictable.
5) Backups are king. I have had so many other little problems, I’m glad to have lots of backups. I do have one DVD that I don’t have a backup for that keeps failing on one of the installs. It’s annoying, but I’ll survive.
Hopefully, I’ll be performing a clean install of my Linux machine in the next couple of days.