Does the Lion upgrade preserve symlinks at the root level?
August 2, 2011 5:55 PM Subscribe
Will an upgrade to OSX Lion from Snow Leopard preserve or destroy my /Applications symlink?
My boot disk is a hard drive, but my /Applications directory is a symlink to an SSD. If I upgrade to Lion, will it keep this, or destroy the symlink and add a new (mostly empty) /Applications folder?
My boot disk is a hard drive, but my /Applications directory is a symlink to an SSD. If I upgrade to Lion, will it keep this, or destroy the symlink and add a new (mostly empty) /Applications folder?
I suspect the installer will want to dump the Lion versions of the standard MacOS X apps (Mail, Safari, iCal, etc) into /Applications and not respect a symlink. Even though I did the upgrade a few days ago, I don't remember the installer having a lot of customization to it.
posted by birdherder at 6:31 PM on August 2, 2011
posted by birdherder at 6:31 PM on August 2, 2011
This is a good question. I should probably know this with 100% certainty, but I don't.
That said, I very strongly suspect the installer will respect your symlink. Obviously all caveats about having good, tested backups apply here.
But, I mean, Software Update respects it, correct?
posted by churl at 9:33 PM on August 2, 2011
That said, I very strongly suspect the installer will respect your symlink. Obviously all caveats about having good, tested backups apply here.
But, I mean, Software Update respects it, correct?
posted by churl at 9:33 PM on August 2, 2011
There's a lot of changes under the hood of Lion. You definitely want to have a good backup in-place before you upgrade to Lion. I'm a moderator on a Mac users board, and I can't recall an upgrade that has frustrated/angered/confused seasoned Mac users the way lion has. I haven't come across a member post dealing with your specific question, though. Birdherder is correct that the Lion installer is probably going to add the normal Apple apps back into a normal Apps folder. This would include all the Utilities, too.
I would also suggest you double-check that all of the apps you rely on are Lion-compatible.
posted by Thorzdad at 4:38 AM on August 3, 2011
I would also suggest you double-check that all of the apps you rely on are Lion-compatible.
posted by Thorzdad at 4:38 AM on August 3, 2011
Response by poster: I've been running Lion on a few other machines, so I have a pretty good idea of what's working already. This is the only one with a root-level symlink though. Software Update does respect it.
posted by Caviar at 5:43 AM on August 3, 2011
posted by Caviar at 5:43 AM on August 3, 2011
Best answer: Update: I tried this, and it doesn't preserve the symlink. It moved all of my applications to a real /Applications folder on the root drive, and the SSD directory was mostly empty after the upgrade. As near as I can tell, the installer actually moves your applications out of /Applications (at this point, it was the symlink) to a temporary directory, merges the updated applications from Lion into that directory, wipes out the root folders and replaces them, and then moves your applications back into /Applications.
That said, it seems to work fine after I restored the symlink.
posted by Caviar at 5:06 PM on August 12, 2011
That said, it seems to work fine after I restored the symlink.
posted by Caviar at 5:06 PM on August 12, 2011
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posted by kindall at 6:30 PM on August 2, 2011