13 Sep 2009 by Chris     3 Comments    Posted under: Gadgetry and IT

Documenting a clean install of OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard

I’m one of those obsessives who likes to reformat his hard drive and reinstall everything from time to time. Even if it doesn’t speed the system up with Macs like it so obviously does with Windows, I just feel better knowing that my machine only has on it what I need to have. With major operating system revisions coming along every year or two, coupled with buying a new Mac every two or three years, I probably end up doing a fresh installation once a year.

I’ve done this so many times that I have a list of core applications with any installation notes/codes, which makes things a lot easier (a bit like having a packing list for holidays). However, this time I thought I’d document the whole process, with timings, for future reference.

0 hrs 00 min – Plug in the old hard drive containing the previous Mac backup from the previous clean install a year ago. Looks a bit dusty, I reckon I never had to refer back to it. Make a copy of the very old “Documents” folder there, from over a year ago, to DVD, just to be on the safe side.

0:10 – Copy my existing Mac internal drive contents to this external hard drive, using Carbon Copy Cloner. Now there’s a full restorable backup of the Mac, which can even be booted-from if necessary! This’ll take a couple of hours.

2:15 – Export iCal and Address Book data, not that you can’t restore it from a backup, but it does go in some funny places. Print off list of all applications from Applications folder. Tick off the essentials to be restored later (seems to be only about 30 out of nearly 120 apps on the current setup are actually ones I think I’ll want in the future!). Make note of any add-ons to applications, such as Firefox, and export settings from any which have them (Fetch preferences, for example). Separately backup old Keychains directory from [user] > Library > Keychains.

2:25 – Make one last check of external hard drive backup, and look trustingly at my normal DVD backups of important stuff.

2:30 – Stick in Snow Leopard DVD, click “install”, then follow the Apple clean install instructions: in the first pane of the installer, click Utilities, then click Restart; on restart, choose Utilities > Disk Utility, select your disk, click the Erase tab, select Mac OS Extended (Journaled), type a disk name, click Erase, then afterwards, choose Disk Utility > Quit Disk Utility and follow the reinstall instructions.

3:20 – Admire lovely clean install of Snow Leopard. Then update with Software Update.

3:25 – Restore old keychain from/to [user] > Library > Keychains. Before launching iTunes, copy back iTunes library folder (similar for iPhoto).

3:55 (it’s a big iTunes library!) – fire up iTunes and iPhoto to test restored libraries. Open iCal and Address Book and import from previous exports. Install iLife applications. Software Update everything. Restore iTunes Applescripts by copying them from Library>iTunes>Scripts to a similar folder.

4:25 – Install other applications identified on printed-off list as being required. Check latest versions on each.

5:50 – Done! And yes, I have to say, it does feel a lot slicker. That’s less than six hours start to finish, of which about two-and-a-bit were spent actually sitting in front of the Mac doing something. Definitely worth it. See you again next year.

Got anything to say? Go ahead and leave a comment!