Upgrading Tiger to Snow Leopard – will I lose GarageBand?

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I'll be upgrading my 2006 iMac from Tiger to Snow Leopard this weekend, and I'm worried about losing some files and applications. Specifically, I have about 100 GarageBand files made with GarageBand 3 and I don't know if I'll be able to open them once I upgrade to Snow Leopard. Will I lose the GarageBand 3 application? If I download a new version of iLife, will I be able to open the old GarageBand files?
 

chscag

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Assuming you have an Intel iMac which is needed in order to upgrade to Snow Leopard, if you install the Snow Leopard upgrade it does not come with iLife. In order to get iLife, you would either have to purchase the full boxed version of Snow Leopard or download iLife from the App store after upgrading to Snow Leopard 10.6.6 or higher.

I'm not certain Garage Band 3 will work with the latest version of Snow Leopard. However, since your iMac is a 2006 model, it's likely running Tiger. In order to upgrade from Tiger to Snow Leopard, you'll have to do a clean install. That means you'll lose everything unless you back it up first to an external hard drive. If you're currently running Leopard, the Snow Leopard upgrade will work and will not remove or overwrite your Garage Band files.

The bottom line here is that you should back up everything anyway before doing an OS X upgrade.
 
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I do have an external drive and I'll back up everything I want to save before upgrading. The thing is, I did a test today where I used a flash drive to move one of my GarageBand songs to a laptop running Leopard, and it didn't open.

These GarageBand files aren't going to be used any time soon, they're mainly being kept for nostalgic purposes so I suppose I could keep them and accept that I'll have to go through some trouble to be able to open them.
 
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In order to upgrade from Tiger to Snow Leopard, you'll have to do a clean install. That means you'll lose everything unless you back it up first to an external hard drive. If you're currently running Leopard, the Snow Leopard upgrade will work and will not remove or overwrite your Garage Band files.

Can he not do an A&I?
 

chscag

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Can he not do an A&I?

Not with Snow Leopard. By default, Snow Leopard will upgrade Leopard or itself without overwriting or removing applications, documents, photos, and the like. It will however, overwrite or replace system files, kernel extensions, and so forth.

There is a work around for doing an Archive and Install with Snow Leopard that can be used. LINK
 

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Not sure which Garageband is version 3. I have the iLife '08 and Garageband works in Snow Leopard here.
 

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