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Sunday, May 1, 2005 |
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There's a Tiger in Someone's Tank Get Ready for Tiger
 Friday evening - MacNet - Maui’s only Macintosh only retailer
held a Tiger release party where over forty of the faithful, many over
fifty, attended a presentation on Apple’s exciting new
operating system. We had a chance to play with Tiger on their floor
computers and many whipped out their checkbooks to adopt the new cat in town.
Being a scotsman though,
I had ordered mine weeks ago through Amazon because their $35 dollar
discount was just too good to pass up, so I’ll be waiting for
a few more days until the USPS gets my copy up the mountain sometime
next week. Until then I’ll be backing up everything on all
my Macs in order to prevent any hassles. Addenda:
I’m still waiting for my copy of Tiger to ship from Amazon,
it was released Friday, and my Amazon account shows that it still
hasn’t left their warehouse. While I’ve had great
results in the past, I don’t think I’ll ever order
any time-critical products from them. It’s embarrassing that
my clients have the program but I don’t. We’ll,
that’s what I get for being so cheap.
Here’s the trick:
if you exhibit extreme paranoia and carefully back up all your
important files and settings, repair your drives and burn offerings to
the OS gods, then everything will work just fine and you’ll
wonder why you bothered.
If you don’t do this,
then you may be one of the tiny minority of victims who have lightning
strike their shed just as the installation tucks in the last corner,
leaving you with a blank spinning disk after the smoke clears. This
follows the principal that those who compulsively back up never lose
any files, people well-covered by health insurance never get sick and
firemen don't never need to call themselves.
What to do while waiting for the boat.
1. Backup!
- Copy the “Documents” folder from your Home onto a recordable CD. You do have all your important files in your Documents folder don’t you?
- Open the Library folder,
also in your Home, locate the folder named “Mail”
then drag that to the blank CD. If you’ve been a good citizen
and kept all of your important stuff in the Documents folder, then
you’ll have just saved most of what’s important.
- If there’s room on the CD or you have a DVD
burner on your Mac, then copy the entire “Library”
folder from your Home. This will back up all of your settings as well
as your emails.
- If you use Quicken or another other accounting program, first make sure that your actual data files
are in the program folder, then drag the entire thing to the CD. Most
accounting programs, and especially the documents containing your
information are relatively small and simple to back up, so just grab
the whole folder and put it on the CD.
- Burn the CD.
Eject it when the burn is complete, then stick it back in and check to
make sure that all the files are actually present. This is always a
good idea when burning a CD because just like the old diskettes - one out of ten disks will probably be defective.
2. Backup - again, somewhere else. Just for the hell of it. One neat trick is to backup
your important documents and library to an iPod. You can erase it later
after your Tiger update is complete and everything still works.
3. Repair and Prepare!
- Reboot your computer with while holding down the shift key
until the little spinning thing comes up. Wait until the startup is
finished then restart normally, holding down nothing special except your lunch. This will repair most problems with your
hard drive according to your current system’s requirements.
- Run the Disk Utility program
- It’s in the Utility folder inside of the Applications
folder. Repair your permissions. Don’t bother clicking on
‘Verify Permissions” just ’Repair
Permissions’.
- A Better Repair
- Start up your computer with the new Tiger disk, and when it gets to
the part where the installation begins, instead of continuing or
clicking on “Install”, instead go to the Apple Menu
and select ‘Run Disk Utility’ then do a
‘Repair Drive” and Repair permissions. Doing it
this way will allow Tiger to repair your drive and make it ready for
the installation. Since I
don’t yet have Tiger, there may be some minor difference from
these instructions. What you want to do ideally is to check and repair
your drives using the latest version of the system utility just in case
it does a better job than the older version.
Now that I’ve scared the shit out of ya’ll,
you should know that if you just do an installation then reboot
everything will probably work just fine. You will probably never have a
serious auto accident or be involved in a plane crash or terrorist
activity. But I still carry a knife, credit card and flashlight just in
case. And after losing everything to a bad drive crash so recently I
plan on using the Tiger upgrade as an excuse to back the fook out of
everything just in case my karma springs a leak.
10:02:47 AM 
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