Yosemite is out and there are all sorts of nifty new bells and whistles. Should you upgrade?
That’s kind of a personal question. It really depends on a number of things. The first question that needs to be asked is: “DO YOU HAVE A BACKUP?” If the answer to that is “no” I highly recommend backing up before using your computer for much of anything else. The only time I can advocate not having a backup is if you have absolutely nothing that you care about on a machine. If the machine could be thrown off a precipice, never to be seen again, and a new machine would be given to you, and your only thoughts would be “Hooray, a new machine!” not the typical “all my pictures and stuff were on there 🙁 “ response. Long winded digression cut short – if there is stuff on your computer that you don’t want to lose, put that stuff somewhere else. When you have put that stuff somewhere else you call that a backup.
The reason I ask, is that all sorts of things can go wrong when you upgrade an OS. Upgrading an OS generally means a great deal of data is going to be changed, many many read and write cycles. Enough read write cycles to kill a failing drive, or knock a seemingly healthy drive into failure. There are also some other rare things that can happen, they don’t happen to a large percentage of users, but no matter how rare it is, if it happens to you, it’s very significant and probably a great deal more inconvenient. Data loss is a painful thing. Any experienced computer user is well versed in data loss. The joke is that there are two types of people- those who have lost data, and those who will.
There are a lot of ways to backup your stuff. The more important your stuff is, the more backed up you want it to be. I am amazed at how many people assume they have a backup in the cloud. If you think this, but are not absolutely certain, do not trust it, and have something that you do trust and are absolutely certain about.
Back in my PC days (not too long ago) I took the files I really cared about and put them on external hard drives, sometimes shared them with friends. Sometimes I burned a bunch of pictures to CDs, sometimes I needed to burn many many CDs to get all of them. If it was something written I would print it out. To this day I have many of those CDs and old external hard drives and sheets of paper. It was a lot of effort, but it worked, and it’s held up to the test of time, close to 14 years for some of that stuff.
The Mac has some really wonderful tools for backing up. Time machine is a really great utility to copy all your files to an external hard drive. It will take a whole snapshot of your machine, with all your files in every nook and cranny. If any changes are made to those files, it will back up the complete file that has been changed, and you will have different versions of that file from different points in time. Time Machine is an app by Apple and has been bundled for free with the Mac OS since 10.5 Leopard, released in late 2007. If your machine is newer than that or has been upgraded to a Mac OS version newer than that, chances are that Time Machine is already on your machine. I use Time Machine in addition to my old PC backup methods.
For the first time, just last week, I did a clone of my HDD. I now have a bootable copy of my drive, copied onto another drive. What this means, is that I can plug this external hard drive into my many, or any other compatible machine, press and hold the option key during boot up, select my external hard drive, and the machine will boot from that hard drive instead of the drive built into the machine. This was a great move before I upgraded to Yosemite, my fears of losing any functionality or compatibility that I had with Mac OS 10.9 Mavericks is totally gone. If I need Mavericks, all I need to do is plug in that external drive and go through the contortions described above and my old OS is running on my machine that I upgraded to the newer OS.
There are a couple of well known programs for creating a bootable clone of your hard drive. Carbon Copy Cloner and Super Duper are the big two that we use here in the Small Dog service dept. I can not really get a strong fix on which one is better. I used Super Duper, and I’m happy with the results. Both programs are free, but offer more features if you register them for a fee.
I’m happy with Mac OS 10.10 Yosemite and it’s new look and new features, but I wouldn’t have been comfortable making the jump without having adequate backups.