After much deliberation, i finally got round to upgrading my Macbook from Mac OS X Tiger to Mac OS X Leopard.

Installation was mostly automated. I decided that as i still had Linux installed on the machine, i might as well just reformat it a start from scratch. After putting in everything needed, i sat back for nearly an hour until it finally finished installing.

After watching the fancy new intro movie and filling in all of the dialogs, i ended up with the desktop, which surprisingly wasn’t as bad as i had first imagined.

There was however a little issue i had to address: I had to copy across all of my files to the new installation. The only problem was that most of them were in a FileVault which i backed up from my Tiger installation.

Interestingly Leopard uses “.sparsebundle” files instead of “.sparseimage” files to store FileVault’s, so i couldn’t just copy my old FileVault over and log back in with all of my files and settings in tact. No, i had to figure out a workaround.

Firstly, i made sure i was logged into a different user account than the one i was restoring. I then opened up my old ”.sparseimage” file which mounted at ”/Volumes/jamesu”.

Now i could’ve just gone into Finder and copy all of my files over just like that, but then i realised that there were a lot of hidden files present so i needed to make sure they were copied too. Thus i decided to open up Terminal and use a command line tool called “ditto” to copy my stuff across, which tries its best to preserve all of the metadata.

sudo ditto -X /Volumes/jamesu /Users/jamesu
sudo chown -R jamesu:staff /Users/jamesu

So now i could just log-in and everything would more or less work. However i also remembered that i had some more files from when i was using my Linux installation. These were on another machine, so i first copied them across. For this i used SSHFS, but any method is applicable. I then utilised another command line tool called “rsync” which synchronises files between two locations in order to copy only the files which had changed from my last Mac backup (which my Linux copy was based off of).

sudo rsync -vrlptc --inplace /Stuff/jamesu_linux /Users/jamesu
sudo chown -R jamesu:staff /Users/jamesu

And viola! I could now log-in, safe in the knowledge that all of my important files were accounted for. Of course, i also turned FileVault back on so my important documents were now safe from prying eyes again.

Now i’ve got everything sorted, i think i’m going to check up on the exciting new developer API’s present in Leopard.

Until next time.