Chasing the Snow Leopard
The modern composer lives in the software world these days, especially if you use software-based instruments to produce your compositions. If you hang apple-shaped curtains, then today’s release of Apple’s Mac OS X Snow Leopard may pose a temptation for you: Should you upgrade, or should you wait?
Common wisdom would dictate that you wait until the dust settles, reports of what works and what doesn’t are in, and developers of the various music and audio applications, plug-ins, and hardware drivers you use in your production environment are all up-to-date with their Snow Leopard compatibility. And with good reason: Any initial release of a major operating system could potentially cause major headaches if you are working on a deadline and the upgrade yields some unexpected results.
However, especially with the Mac OS X system there are some great ways to create a test environment based on your existing system, which you can play with before rolling out a new upgrade into your production environment.
Important: Before I dive into some of the details, let me emphatically state a disclaimer, that following these steps are solely meant as a guideline and you are essentially responsible for taking necessary precautions so as to not loose valuable data (have I mentioned the word ‘backup’ yet?) Don’t shout at me if your production system is spitting up green goo, or is making rude noises. You have been warned! 
What’s Needed?
There are a couple of items you will need to follow this process:
- Either a separate hard disk (external or internal), or an unused partition in your Mac
- SuperDuper! system backup software
Instead of SuperDuper! you can use other backup software, but ensure that a complete backup of your main Mac drive yields a bootable copy.
If you are using a new hard disk for this process, or you are erasing an existing disk to create a new partition, make sure that in Disk Utility you use ‘Options…’ before you partition the new disk and choose ‘GUID Partition Table’ scheme. Otherwise the Snow Leopard installer complains that it can’t install on a non-GUID partition.
Making a Bootable Clone
You will need to create a bootable backup (clone) with SuperDuper!, which is straight forward and allows you to essentially create a clone of your main Mac OS disk. Using the ‘Backup – all files’ option will produce an identical and bootable copy of your Mac OS disk.
You will need to specify the ‘Copy’ disk (your Mac HD drive) and the ‘to’ disk, which is your separate drive, or your second unused partition. Note that this process will wipe out any previous data on the target drive, so make sure you use one that you can afford to loose the data.
SuperDuper! Mac Backup Tool
Booting From the Cloned Drive
The Mac OS X has the beautiful ability to boot from a drive other than your internal main disk. This means that you can easily boot from the cloned drive you just created with a mere switch in the Startup Disk preference pane. This you can find in the System Preferences in the System section. Simply select the cloned disk and click on ‘Restart’. Your Mac will reboot from the cloned disk.
Startup Disk Preference Pane
The Fun Part
Once your Mac reboots with the cloned disk as your OS disk, you are now ready to upgrade the OS to Snow Leopard. During the upgrade, make sure you select the correct disk to put the upgrade on, which should be your cloned disk.
When the upgrade finishes, you have a previous OS disk and the newly upgraded Snow Leopard system disk that you can switch back and forth with the Startup Disk preference pane. This essentially allows you to test your software and hardware for compatibility, while continuing production work from your original disk. Since you cloned your original drive, all the software, including hardware drivers, are present under Snow Leopard and you should be able to tell quickly whether you would run into any issues with the upgrade.
Once you have convinced yourself that all is well, you can simply just start up your Mac with the original OS disk and perform the upgrade on that disk as well. Done!
Let me stress again that I highly recommend having good backups available. Performing the cloned disk upgrade process should be straight forward, but don’t come running to me if you just happened to forget to make that all important backup and something does go wrong.
Enjoy Snow Leopard!
If you want to track issues that other composers have identified with Snow Leopard upgrades, you may want to follow SCOREcast’s blog comments.
Apple also posted a support article that lists known incompatible software, which is mored to a folder named ‘Incompatible Software’ if encountered. Follow the link for frequent updates to the list.
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