Get Ready for Lion
Lion is finally ready, but are you ready for Lion? OS upgrades offer the thrill of new features, better performance and bug fixes, but they come at a price — your time and potentially your productivity. If you upgrade your OS only to discover that a critical third-party application or peripheral doesn't work right, you could be really lost trying to downgrade your Mac. Unless, that is, you have a complete, bootable backup of your Mac, pre-Lion.
Make your bootable backup
- Get a backup disk. If you need advice, we offer some here in CCC's documentation
- Prepare your backup volume for an installation Mac OS X
- Download CCC and fire it up
- Choose your startup disk in the Source menu
- Choose your backup volume in the Destination menu
- Click the Clone button
Sit back and watch the fastest cloning tool on Earth. When you're bored after about three minutes, check out the new features in CCC 3.4.
Update your Mac
Download Lion from the App Store and let it do its magic.
Play! And make sure everything is working...
Take some time to run the applications that are most important to you. Remember that Lion no longer supports PowerPC applications, so fire up the Apple System Profiler and see if any of your applications won't work.
If things look pretty good, detach your backup disk from your Mac and set it aside for a couple days. If, after a week or so you decide that everything is copacetic, fire up CCC and re-run the backup task with the same settings — CCC will update your backup volume with only the items that have changed since your last backup.
If you have to downgrade, here's what you need to do
- Attach your CCC backup disk to your Mac
- Open the Startup Disk preference pane in the System Preferences application
- Choose your backup volume as the startup disk, then click on the Restart button
- Ah yes, there's your old Mac, everything in order! If you need to get real work done, go right ahead. Anything you modify on the backup disk will be restored later.
- Launch CCC
- Select your backup volume from the source menu
- Select your Lion volume from the destination menu
- Stick with the default preset, "Temporarily archive modified and deleted items"
- Click the Clone button
When the restore process has completed, reset your startup disk in the System Preferences application and restart your Mac. You'll be back to Snow Leopard in no time! It'll be like putting on an old, comfortable pair of shoes that were just sitting there in the back of your closet, waiting for you to come home.
