How to best procedurally backup and reformat a Macbook with Leopard?

February 9, 2009 2:16 PM

How to best procedurally backup and reformat a Macbook with Leopard?

My 2 year old Macbook has started giving me issues such as really sluggish/bad framerates while watching any type of video, complete system crashes, etc. I can't really attribute the issues to any specific application or plugin, and while I see spikes in Activity Monitor when Quicktime, Firefox, etc. are open, they shouldn't be hitting the levels and rendering the system as slow as it is becoming. I have 2 gigs of ram, so that's not really an issue.

In any case, I'm going to go ahead and do a refresh, by backing up and then reformatting. I'm wondering what the smoothest, cleanest way to do this is. I have a drive dedicated to Time Machine, and I know of things like SuperDuper, etc. However, I want to ensure my new install is as clean as possible and wont come with whatever issues may be giving me trouble right now. What install/format type do I want to do with my Leopard disc? How can I best backup my Firefox bookmarks/settings/plugins, etc.? How can I be sure not to lose any media in my Library folders? How can I best load all of my files and settings back onto the clean install?

posted by rbf1138 to computers & internet (8 comments total)

Listen to the area next to the battery (under the keyboard arrows) when your computer goes into a fit and takes a while to do something. If you hear clicking or weird sounds, your hard drive may be failing. It is easy to replace a hard drive without removing any data or reinstalling the OS.

Search other ask mefi threads on this. I used SuperDuper to transfer data over to a new (much larger) hard drive.
posted by ijoyner at 3:05 PM on February 9

This is not an answer to your question, but have you done a hardware test that came on a CD with the laptop? I was having some similar problems for a while and then finally it started crapping out completely with the curtain crashes. The hardware test gave me an error with the video controller and I had to get it fixed. Thankfully I have the apple care package so I didn't have to pay for it.
posted by chillmost at 3:06 PM on February 9

I would:
-make note of what's in your applications folder : what needs to be reinstalled from the original disc, what you'd need to download again from the internets, and anything in there that you don't really use anymore
-make a backup of your home folder(s)
-do an erase & install (that's what it's called in the installer)
-walk through the first-time startup and create a new user account
-run software update
-run it again
-and again, until there are no updates left.
-reinstall all your applications : applications originally installed from discs should be reinstalled from disc, not by restoring from a backup
-run software update again until there are no updates left
-migrate your data over from your backed-up home folder
-migrate your user preferences over from the backed-up home folder
--pay attention to the prefs that you're migrating for applications that were having problems before.
-profit.

that's how I did it, anyways. It took a while, but I ended up with a fresh install, noticeably faster, but I still had all my stuff from before, and there was a minimum of re-customization after the reinstall. You could choose to restore your user account from a time machine backup during the first-run process, but I've heard of people having mixed experiences with that.
posted by kid_dynamite at 3:06 PM on February 9

Were this a machine I was responsible for, I'd try to determine whether the problems you're having are User-related, Application-related, or System-related. Truthfully, a nuke-from-orbit scenario like you're asking about isn't really only necessary for the 3rd of these. Here's how to tell:

- Create a new user on your system. Log in as that user and replicate the things you were doing that were causing the problems. If the problems persist, then it's not a User issue, but an Application, or System issue.

- If you determine the problem to be Application, or System related (it doesn't happen across users), then you should re-install the Application(s) in question. Firefox is acting up? Reinstall Firefox. Adobe CS3 apps are acting up? Delete them an all their associated data in /Library/Application Support/ and reinstall. Rinse and repeat.

- If re-installing Applications and paring down associated .plist files and support files doesn't help--if the problem continues to persist, then I'd begin to think about a System reinstall. But first I'd rule out hardware by booting the machine from a Firewire or USB hard drive with an OS installed on it and try to replicate the problem behavior while booted from that different operating system (Mac OS X on the external HD, not Mac OS X on the internal HD).

Note that you can relatively easily transfer a User profile from and older Mac OS X install to a brand new one, barring a few minor permissions issues that might need to be cleaned up. And Applications will need to be reinstalled after the HD wipe and OS reinstall. Your User profile contains all of that data you're worried about--the Music libraries, documents, etc.
posted by mrbarrett.com at 3:10 PM on February 9

Do not ever trust time machine for critical backups, period. Apple says so themselves.

You should buy some new external drive larger than your current hard disk and make a full bootable backup with carbon copy cloner. You can then reinstall Leopard on your main drive, copying over data you need, rebuilding your preferences, and reinstalling applications, while always being able to boot into your old system off that external drive.

I'd suggest buying two external drives and also keeping bootable carbon copy cloner backups of your new system, once you've mostly got it running. Ain't no such thing as too many backups.
posted by jeffburdges at 3:53 PM on February 9

Chillmost, which cd is that? I have a Leopard cd, but not any of the original discs that came with the computer. Maybe I can download the test from Apple?
posted by rbf1138 at 4:00 PM on February 9

Well I'm not going to get into whether you actually NEED to reinstall because mrbarrett covered that pretty well. However, if it turns out that you do and need to back everything up and then nuke and pave, my advice is as follows:

- First, make a copy of your user folder to an external USB/firewire drive. That's the one located in Macintosh HD/Users/$username

- After you reinstall, almost all of the contents of this can be copy/pasted into their equivalent locations on the new install. However, the contents of the user's Library folder can cause some problem, so here's an article that tells you how to make a nice copy of the more critical parts of this folder.

- Your firefox bookmarks will be somewhere in that folder too, and will probably be something you can simply copy over, but even if not Firefox has an export bookmarks function which saves them as an html file, and you can restore from that file.

- Other than this, your major concern is the applications. Do you use iLife (iPhoto, iDVD, iMovie, Garageband, iWeb)? If you don't have the original disks or a newer version of iLife then it will be difficult to transfer these over. iPhoto can probably work just copied over, but iMovie, Garageband and iDVD at least have supporting files, located in Macintosh HD/Library/Application Support - and while it might be possible to get this over intact, it's tricky.

Personally if I were going to do this and only had a Leopard install disk, I would proceed like so
- 1. Make a Time Machine backup to an external drive (although it's not something to place absolute faith in, it is highly unlikely it will fail to work, and we're taking extra precautions)
- 2. Make an additional copy of your user folder(s), just in case
- 3. Boot to Leopard install disk, proceed to the Select a Destination screen, click the Macintosh HD and click Options, then erase the drive
- 4. Once the reinstall is complete, it will start up with the initial setup option. One of the items in this stage will be the option to migrate from another computer or a backup. Select that you want to migrate from the backup.
- 5. It will give you the option to transfer various different parts:

- Applications
- Users
- System files
- Other files and folders

From this, select ONLY the Applications and Users. You've got an extra copy of your users to fall back on if this process has problems, and if it doesn't you've just got a fresh install, but kept all your stuff.
posted by fearnothing at 5:16 PM on February 9

I know this is an unpopular piece of advice in the Mac community and I've taken my fair share of flaming on it - but it might be related to file fragmentation, or to be precise, lack of unfragmented, free diskspace.

I had this problem on my iBook G4 in the past, symptoms included randomly crashing / beach ball of death spinning applications, general slugghishness and really unpleasant stuttering when watching videos larger than a few MB. Fix: easy.

Get SuperDuper or CarbonCopy Cloner, an external firewire drive, clone HDD to external drive, boot OS X from said drive, erase internal HDD, clone back. Everything will be written on the internal HDD in order without fragments, free space will be unfragmented and performance will increase. At least it did for me, I did this twice in the past 3.5 years. So before you nuke the whole installation and set everything up from scratch - give it a try, it takes only a few hours.

Bonus if crashes still occor: you already have your system cloned to an external drive and can proceed with the advice given above.
posted by starzero at 10:55 PM on February 9