Wed Jul 31, 2013 1:53 am
Has anyone upgraded to the Mountain Lion operating software on their Mac recently? I've got an iMac running Lion and have downloaded Mountain Lion but not installed it yet, because apparently it's a pretty clever idea to back up your stuff before going ahead with any upgrade. However, I gather that you need an external hard drive to do this, either via 'Time Machine' or a 'cloner' such as 'Carbon Copy Cloner'. I have actually downloaded the 'Carbon Copy Cloner', but you still need the external hard drive, which costs anything from £50-£100 or even more. I've got Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 on it and therefore many Word documents (mostly school stuff), but seeing as I've just finished A-levels, I don't think I'll be needing them any more, though I clearly would like to keep them. I'm only mentioning the fact that I won't really be needing them any longer because it seems that not backing up your stuff coupled with the installation of an upgrade going wrong can lose the aforementioned documents and other things, presumably your iTunes library and files on iPhoto, for instance.
I've researched the whole thing and it is supposedly slim that you'd lose such files, but you can never be sure with it, I suppose. Of course, should I get an external hard drive, it does not have to be purely for a one-off upgrade - you can use it regularly since it is seemingly good practice to make regular back-ups of your files. So should I bother with backing up, or should I take the risk (if indeed there is any real peril) of not doing so?
Wed Jul 31, 2013 5:19 am
You can always back up files using Dropbox or something.
Wed Jul 31, 2013 7:25 am
1. get a hard drive, they are handy for use after
2. use cloud storage sites such as drop box and just save your most important stuff
3. ive upgraded my mac a few times, never had a problem or lost anything, so i would say its pretty safe to just go for it!