The Enspired Blog

Well, I was prepared for a little more pain in upgrading to Leopard. I guess because I took the upgrade path instead of a clean install it required less effort. My existing Rails setup is fully functional by my early assessment. MySQL is alive and kicking, and mongrel fires up just fine. There may be some unnecessary residual stuff by upgrading vs. doing a clean install, but my time is more valuable than a pristine installation at this point.

As a precaution, I went ahead and bought an external hard drive to do a full backup. I’m really amazed at the affordability of drive space these days. I bought a Western Digital My Book, 500 GB USB 2.0 drive for about $120 at Best Buy. I plugged it in and it worked right out of the box. I had read up on the best backup/clone software and had downloaded Carbon Copy Cloner and SuperDuper!. For some reason though, neither application would successfully complete a backup. So I dug around a little until I found that the My Book drive was preformatted as FAT32, which is cross-platform, but limited to 4GB files.

So I reformatted the My Book drive to Mac OS Extended (Journaled), verified permissions on my drive and fired up CCC one more time. This time, after 6 1/2 hours, my hard drive was successfully cloned and verified. Feeling secure that my applications and data were safe and accessible, I launched the Leopard installer and everything went smoothly from there.

Today, I’m back to work, finding time to explore the new features of Leopard a little at a time. My Rails environments are functioning as expected and all my supporting applications seem to work. I guess we’ll see if everything continues to work as I get further into some of my edge scenarios, but so far I’m very pleased.