After a year and a half of using my powerbook, I decided to reinstall Mac OS X. This was the first time I was doing this so I really wanted to prepare myself by backing up everything in my external HDDs.
I am still not done with the full restore of my old system, but what I learned was I had a lot of apps installed before that I rarely use! Also, because I reinstalled the Mac OS by selecting the customize option, I was able to select what stuff to put. This saved me around 4GB of space. In summary, here’s what I customized:
- removed the printers in the Mac OS installation (~2GB of data)
- did not install Garage Band and iWeb (~2GB)
I have most of the updates to the apps I am using and I still have around 64GB free from my 80GB (~75 GB really). Once I put back my iTunes Library of around 25GB, there goes my free space. Therefore, I am still thinking if I should just keep my iTunes library externally so that I have more space for my photos.
So, for those interested in what I did to back-up my data, here it goes:
- iCal and Address Book: generated DB backups
- Photos, Docs, Music, Movies, etc: moved all the folders in my external HDD
- important applications: moved/copied them to my HDD. It helps a lot that installing apps in Mac is done by simply dragging-and-dropping the application to the Applications Folder.
- downloaded the latest Apple Software Updates so that I don’t have to connect to the Internet later on. I failed on the iLife updates here because I wasn’t able to get the earlier updates. But the OS one worked fine. Don’t forget to get the OS X Combo Update here.
That’s all I can remember… off to installing and restoring my data. I’ll share more if I discover something new. Overall, it’s a good exercise because now, I am able to take all of my data and put them in DVDs knowing that I can always restore them later on. It’s not like the Time Machine (of Leopard) but I’m okay with my tedious process.
