El Capitan has arrived! But before making the leap to the latest operating system we recommend a full back up of your machine before you install OS X El Capitan. Apple makes it easy to back up your Mac using Time Machine, and it is important to create a Time Machine backup before installing OS X El Capitan.
Once you have completed your Time Machine backup, you’ll want to run any existing updates on your computer, including third party software. You can check for updates for any Apple software on your machine by simply clicking the Apple symbol in the upper left hand corner of your computer. If there are updates to run they will appear next to the App Store in the drop down menu. Finally, double check that your computer meets the system requirements for El Capitan. Generally speaking if your already running 10.9 or 10.10 it’s likely you will have no issues with your machine upgrading, but it’s always good practice to just double check. When reviewing your computer’s system requirements one detail that is often overlooked is hard drive space, El Capitan is going to need about 6GB of hard drive space for the installation, so double checking that your computer has enough free hard drive space is essential. You will want to not only ensure there is enough space on the drive, but that the space remaining after the installation is also sufficient. We have seen over the years many customers who have ensured they have the recommended hard drive space free on their machine, but neglected to ensure that once the installation was complete there would still be plenty of hard drive space. The recommendation is to never have any less than 10% of your hard drive free to prevent data corruption. If your down to just 10 or 15 gigabytes of free hard drive space before installation we strongly recommend you take the time to either just delete or transfer non critical files to an external hard drive.
Once you have followed the steps above your ready to download El Capitan! Simply visit the App Store on your machine, search for El Capitan and select download. Depending on your internet connection this could take an hour or it could take several hours, so be patient! If you are updating your laptop it’s critical to remember to plug it into a power source during the download and update to prevent any unexpected errors along the way.
Have more questions about this download and update? E-mail support@smalldog.com or visit the Apple support communities, they are incredible resources to all kinds of questions about your Mac!