#SMART UTILITY VOLITANS INSTALL#
#SMART UTILITY VOLITANS UPDATE#
#SMART UTILITY VOLITANS ARCHIVE#
#SMART UTILITY VOLITANS UPGRADE#
#SMART UTILITY VOLITANS SOFTWARE#

#SMART UTILITY VOLITANS ARCHIVE#

If you’re jumping from 10.X to 10.Y (especially to 10.Z) it’s worth the time it takes to do a proper clean install.Īnd of course once it’s done, you still may need to be able to go back to the ‘old’ system – so you’ll need to clone – not back up or archive but CLONE – your old system before you start, if only for the comfort factor of running back to it when the new system refuses to do something. Serious, serious problems that impacted work (and backups, and archives). I did this ages ago, and the problems didn’t show until 12 months on and we’d gone through some minor version changes and bug fixes. And then there’s the creeping rot of a brand new operating system ‘installed in place’ over the old one. Then of course there’s the impatient teenager in all of us who, after backing up, installs the new OS on top of the old OS, downloads the new app, finds what’s broken in the rest of the system and fixes it, finds out that a few tools don’t work, plug-ins need shuffling, projects don’t render as they used to, fonts have gone missing… All this takes longer, funnily enough. But until you’re sure that the new OS won’t kill your current must-use apps, you can simply shut down, unplug, and return to your current safe system. Plus, it will take time to do the official switch – you’ll have to rebuild your apps, delete old versions that don’t work, sort out new workflows, new versions, reinstall, find license agreements, it all takes time (and it’s not billable for freelancers). Really, that is the safest way – but its frustrating as the performance of a system booted on an external drive isn’t quite what you’re used to, and it’s a bit clunky. You want to play in a protected ‘sand-box’ (I preferred ‘sandpit’ but hey…) so you don’t accidentally convert your current projects to the new system and find yourself committed to the switch.

#SMART UTILITY VOLITANS SOFTWARE#

New versions of software often change the file format and rarely is it back-compatible.

#SMART UTILITY VOLITANS INSTALL#

Install the new software on the fresh OS, and play with COPIES of older projects that you copied across. The safest option for me is (having backed up your main machine of course) to unwrap a brand new hard drive, format it and install the latest OS on it, then boot from THAT.

#SMART UTILITY VOLITANS UPGRADE#

Things can go wrong, things like backups and archives invariably take more time than you thought, and what if it’s all horrible and you need to back track? Smaller jumps, a minor ‘point-oh-one’ upgrades can be welcome relief, but this is a ‘point-one’ and it needs an OS upgrade to boot (pun not intended). Rule 1 of upgrades: never upgrade during a job.

Prepare for some ‘spilled milk’ with Mavericks (for me, Exchange email is broken)Īt first, I thought it odd that Apple released FCPX 10.1 so close to a major worldwide holiday, but on reflection – it’s perfect.Copy older projects to work with, don’t use originals – Philip Hodgetts has made EventManager X free ! Use it to manage your project updates.Clone your drive to a bootable image (to return to in weeks and months to come) with SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner and make a fresh Time Machine backup – make sure they all work before you proceed!.

#SMART UTILITY VOLITANS UPDATE#

Build a new bootable drive with FCPX 10.1 to experiment on – you may not want to update yet.I have to switch from Lion 10.7.5 to Mavericks 10.9, and that’s a big leap. But it requires a major jump in operating system – when your computer is your major money-earning tool and it’s stable and reliable, you don’t touch it unless you have to. Do I need to upgrade? Yes – there’s enough changes in the system that address current issues. On the stroke of midnight, I was pressing the refresh button in the App Store. Your model can be upgraded to 8 GB of RAM.Okay, I admit it. Then just install the new drive in your Mac.Īlso, if your Mac has its original RAM, you might want to upgrade that as well, as Sierra seems to run better with more RAM. That will give you a good copy of the OS and and your files. One good way to proceed would be to get the drive with the enclosure kit, put the drive in the enclosure and mount it, format it, download the OS, install it on the new drive, and us Setup Assistant to migrate your data from your old drive. OWC is a good source of replacement drives, both SSD's and HDD's: A failing drive can more or less keep working for a while, but if it's on its way out, it will die sooner or later.īest thing would be to replace your drive, and if you could replace it with a SSD, you would get a huge boost in performance. You could reformat and reinstall, but if your drive is failing you will be back where you started. 'Passed' may not mean much, but if you get 'Failing', then it's definitely time for a new drive. There is a demo that you can run several times for free. If it's the original drive, it's now 7 years old, which is very long in the tooth, so it might well be starting to fail. It sounds that Disk Utility has encountered a problem with your hard drive.

Smart utility volitans