Will I or won't I. (take the plunge)

Yes I'm still procrastinating. 10.9.5 is what I'm on now, but although I have time machine, I don't even know if that's the back up that I need, or is that not a bootable back up. The iMac has a 1Tb drive and a 1Tb external that's plugged in permanently. The macbook air has a 120Gb drive and a 500Gb external that's plugged in periodically, usually when I get the box that says 'no back ups for xx days'.

Has anyone got the patience to walk me through the procedure using really simple language please.

One thing I'm worried about is whether I might lose the use of some app's etc. If I do lose the use of something that I can't get back, can I revert to 10.9.5 ?

Grateful for any help.

Time Machine backups are not bootable. You could use it to revert to 10.9.5 but you would need to have a copy of the 10.9.5 installer on a bootable USB stick. Check your App Store account to see if it is still there in your purchases. If so it is easy to create a bootable installer.

What OS did your Mac come with initially. If it shipped with 10.9 on it you could use an intern et install to revert the system.

My preferred method for reverting to an older OS is to do the following:

1. esc Carbon Copy Cloner to make a bootable clone of the boot drive before performing the backup. Test the clone to make sure it's bootable then put the clone away.
2. Perform the upgrade to the OS.
3. if you need to revert to the old OS use the bootable clone to do it rather than re-downloading the installer.

Thanks Slydude, but how do I make a bootable backup ? I've got an external optical drive for the iMac, or I could use a thumb drive for either machine although I don't know what size I'd need. Once the backup is done, can it be used for either machine or do I need to do one for each. I've just downloaded a trial version of CCC and now need to find out how to use it.

The iMac came with Mountain Lion, 10.8 ?

Right, as I said, I've now got a trial version of CCC and thanks to RadDave have looked at an instructable for it. I've got a 1TB Seagate external drive that I use for Time Machine on the iMac. Can I wipe the Time Machine backup off and use it for the bootable backup, or could I partition it to be able to create the bootable backup and keep the TM backup as well. Sorry for the endless questions and thanks for helping out again.

It's best to have separate drives: One for CCC and another for Time Machine. Never want to put all your eggs in one basket... ;D

Ok, thanks. I suppose another Seagate will be ok ? And will I need a separate one for each computer ?

Personally, I would avoid Seagate drives for now as they have been problematic, but it's of course your choice. And yes, you should have a separate drive for each computer. I know it means spending more dollars, but much easier to keep track of and in case of failure, easier to recover with separate backups.

It's so hard to keep up with the latest on which drives are to be avoided. Wasn't long ago, I bought only Seagate. Now, I get western digital. I fear waking up and hearing they're all failing now too

Agree on having 2 separate physical drives for TM and Clone. That's a good strategy. If you're extra paranoid, perhaps backing up just the important files to Dropbox is an extra benefit. (Unless of course you're paranoid in a different way and distrust governments watching your files in the cloud heh)

That's been my method for sometime now. CCC is a no brainer investment to me.

Usually I recommend just shop for lowest price. As with many statistics…it's also how the numbers are presented. Sometimes the numbers can be "massaged" to look better or worse depending on an articles or author's point of view.

Here's are two charts for hard drive reliably taken from two different articles. Quite a difference I would say…and very confusing for consumers:





- Nick

I have a Seagate drive, 2TB for my 1TB hard drive. I partitioned it, violating the rule of separate externals for TM and CCC (in my case TechTool Pro). I already have to plug and unplug one USB from my 4-port hub to use my iMic for audio recording and download photos from a camera.

Nick, the backblaze article that had that chart indicated they were mixing brand new drives from most manufacturers in with the old drives they had from WD. So the stats were skewed. The second set of stats is more consistent with what has been shown in lots of studies. Bottom line is that spinning HDs tend to fail after about 4-5 years in service. The curve is a "bathtub" with early failures (so-called infant mortality) and then not many failures at all during the prime of the drive, then failure rates rise rapidly at the 5 year point.

I've seen the same charts used in a number of different articles. Some of them don't do a very good job of explaining the actual ages of the drives in the charts (when they actually fail in months/years). I do remember the one chart mentioning that two model "families" or generations were involved in the stats.

- Nick

Yeah, it was a bit "unfair" to compare new/young drives from three vendors against older drives from the fourth. If you pulled at the data, you could see that the Seagates were failing much sooner than then WDs, but because the WDs were much older, the overall fail rate was higher. My own experience with Seagates is that they haven't been very good, while WDs seem to do well, but that's just my experience. Haven't had an HGST, but may make that my next choice. Although WD recently bought HGST, it may take a while for the HGST "goodness" go transfer into WD as a whole. IBM and Hitachi really did know how to build industrial-strength drives.

The other part that may not be fair (or represented) in the charts…is the quality of the drive. Each manufacturer can have different "quality tiers" of HD. For example…Western Digital has their Green, Blue, and Black drives. Black being the most reliable/durable.

- Nick

Thanks all. I might get a western seagate digital hgds optical ssd drive. As said, charts can be manipulated to suit the person that compiles them... just look at treasury departments.
I'll have a look round to see what's available near me.

Groovetube, surely governments wouldn't spy on us would they ?