Mountain Lion

Being on my first piece of Apple equipment, an iMac mid 2011, I now hope to upgrade to Mountain Lion.Can I ask for advice such as are there any steps I need to take before downloading? Do I need to back up any stuff such as photos on iPhoto. Thanks in advance

Irishman said:

Do I need to back up any stuff such as photos on iPhoto. Thanks in advance

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Even if you were not upgrading to Mountain Lion...it's ALWAYS a good/great idea to have a backup.

- Nick

1. Backup to an external hard drive.

2. Purchase ML from the App Store.

3. Use LionDiskMaker to make a bootable USB flash drive,

4. Run installer.

When the Installer is run it removes ML from the Applications folder.

Thank you pigoo3 and harryb2448.Here comes the silly questions.Is LionDiskMaker on the Lion system or does it need to be downloaded? I gather iDVD is not good for this job.There isn't that much on this machine, 50/60 photos, 20 odd music tracks, but any rough guesses as to what size memory stick I might need.And seeing I am making a plonker of myself here, why would the ML be removed from the Applications folder and I am presuming that that is not a bad thing? As I say, please forgive the questions but between not being very computer savvy and newish to Apple....Regards

Irishman said:

Is LionDiskMaker on the Lion system or does it need to be downloaded?

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It's a free third-party download. It is not strictly necessary, harry recommended it only because it is handy to have in certain situations. The Mountain Lion *installer* program trashes itself when Mountain Lion has been successfully installed, but occasionally a user might wish to reinstall for whatever reason. Having created a USB drive of the installer program before it eliminates itself just saves a potential step if you ever need to reinstall, that's all. Consider that portion of the instructions optional.

I gather iDVD is not good for this job.

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No.

There isn't that much on this machine, 50/60 photos, 20 odd music tracks, but any rough guesses as to what size memory stick I might need.

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Your content is irrelevant. The USB drive harry refers to is for creating a Mountain Lion installer, not for backing up any of your stuff. I suggest an 8GB USB drive if you want to use one to create an installer, though Mountain Lion probably doesn't need much more than 4GB. The 8GB size seems to be the new minimum and should easily be available for $10 or less.

For info purposes:

The Lion Disk Maker application will not work to install Mountain Lion on anything less than an 8 GB flash drive. Nor will it work to install it on a DVD. I tried both as a test to see if the instructions were correct. However, the same app will install Lion on a 4 GB flash drive or a single DVD. Mountain Lion apparently is a larger install.

From memory, which is getting old and flakey, Lion was about a 1.5GB download and Mountain Lion +4GB dowload hence the need for an 8GB flash drive. Here is a link to lionDiskMaker if you choose to go that way:-


http://liondiskmaker.com

Thank you everybody for your help and patience.Can I ask, will I be okay to just buy it on App store and download or are there benefits to keeping a version on a flash drive? I am under the impression that if I need to download it again and am not sure why I would have to, am I not good for it seeing I paid for it.Or is it buy it once and if you need to reload it, you buy it again?

Irishman said:

Thank you everybody for your help and patience.Can I ask, will I be okay to just buy it on App store and download or are there benefits to keeping a version on a flash drive? I am under the impression that if I need to download it again and am not sure why I would have to, am I not good for it seeing I paid for it.Or is it buy it once and if you need to reload it, you buy it again?

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You can re-download it as many times as you want - not that you'd need to, because in the event of a catastrophic failure of your hard disk, you can still re-download it through Internet Recovery.

Having the backup "disc" is really more of a crutch for people that are accustomed to having physical media.

Also, I'd highly recommend having a look at this guide:

OS X Mountain Lion: The Mac-Forums Guide | Mac-Forums BlogMac-Forums Blog

The advantage of having a bootable flash drive is imagine your hard drive fails after the warranty expires and you fit a new drive. With no network settings pretty hard to do a recovery. Plug in flash drive, boot from it and away you go with fresh install. Of course when OS X.9 is released, simply download, format the flash drive again and make that bootable.

Another reason personally great supporter of SuperDuper to clone your entire drive to an external drive. SD does not copy the Recovery Partition.

Thank you everybody.I can now certainly see the wisdom of the back up flash drive.Will have to read through that link a few times though !!