Night Owl Rating:

The first time you gaze at the Leopard upgrade kit, you wonder how something that does so much fits into such a small box. But Apple has taken its environmental pretensions to heart and reduced the extra stuffing in many of its latest software packages — except, of course, for the new Logic Studio, which is positively huge — and rather heavy to boot!

There’s even a tiny manual that contains something more than a short installation guide for once. In its 80 pages, you actually learn about many of the ultra-slick features that Apple has wrought in Leopard. But you’ll still need the Help menu if you want to explore matters further.

What you really want to know, though, is just how loudly this cat roars, and it’s deafening!

Indeed, the most telling comparison I can make between Mac OS X Leopard and Windows Vista is the fact that the former installs reliably, works as advertised and then some, and doesn’t possess any invasive online activation and forced upgrade schemes. In recent days, for example, it’s been reported that Windows OneCare, which is supposed to protect your PC, also happens to turn on automatic updating behind your back, without your permission.

In fact, there’s no major difference between the way Leopard installs on your Mac and previous versions of Mac OS X.

Story continued in this week’s Tech Night Owl Newsletter.

Across the world as I write this, tens of thousands — maybe hundreds of thousands — of copies of Leopard are on their merry way to Mac users. The tech press, and even some mainstream news outlets such as The New York Times, USA Today and The Wall Street Journal, have had the Golden Master versions in their soaking hands for at least a week and have begun to publish reviews.

Regular people, however, unless you were lucky enough to get your copy early (and I’m thinking in terms of a legal copy here), will have to wait for your copy to arrive at your home or office. Or you’ll have to take a shopping trip to the appropriate dealer, or, if you like, attend one of the all-nighters at an Apple Store.

Regardless, before you sit down and install Leopard on your Macs, you’ve got to take a time out and make sure that you are ready for this major upgrade. While a Mac operating system installation is nowhere near as dangerous and troublesome as it can be on the Windows platform, don’t assume it’s seamless. Even if you’ve read that in the paper, or online, don’t take such claims seriously.

Reporters who were favored by Apple to get early access to Leopard also got at least one Mac preconfigured with Leopard. The computers on which they’re installing 10.5 are probably carefully maintained, and the chances that things will go badly aren’t terribly high.

If your Mac has lived a hard live, however, serving you day and night — and sometimes on the weekend — you will not fare well if you throw caution to the wind and go for the gold. Instead, take the time to assess your situation, and consider the following:

1. A recent backup of your entire startup drive is essential. This doesn’t mean you’re in danger of losing a drive during the installation, but you can’t afford to take chances. In fact, if you don’t have a spare drive around, this may be the time to buy one, since you’ll also need one to run Time Machine.
2. Check third-party software for compatibility with Leopard. You may have heard that such disk repair utilities as DiskWarrior and TechTool Pro may require updates, and there are a lot of other applications that have yet to be fully tested with the final version of Leopard. So if you depend on your Mac for your livelihood, proceed with caution. As I suggested in yesterday’s column, there’s nothing wrong in waiting.
3. Let me remind you again that, as with all Intel-based Macs, Classic is history, which means those older Mac applications you’ve depended on all this time won’t work. I wouldn’t take the possibility of a third party solution too seriously, as it may only be useful for experimentation rather than reliable productivity.
4. You might also want to take stock of all your files, and see if there are things you just don’t need, such as photos you want to discard because they didn’t turn out properly. If you have lots of versions of the same software installers, you’ll want to stick with the latest, assuming that’s what you’re using. Just be careful about what you trash, because you don’t want to toss out something you may need later, unless you have a backup that you can use to recover from your mistake.
5. Before installing Leopard, run Disk Utility from the Leopard installer DVD. That way, you can fix minor directory damage, and stop the installation process if serious problems are found that can’t be repaired.
6. Consider your installation strategies. If you have a fairly new Mac that hasn’t had tons of third-party software added, a simple upgrade installation might actually succeed. In fact, most times it does. But if you have installed a lot of stuff, you might want to consider the Archive & Install option, which survives essentially unchanged in Leopard. You can choose the option to preserve your settings, which should speed up the process of getting back to work, although third party software, such as peripheral drivers and input devices, will likely have to be reinstalled.
7. If you’re Mac has been in service for a while, and you have a bootable backup, you might just want to erase your startup drive and begin using Leopard with a clean slate. Here, Apple’s Migration Assistant can grab the files from your backup drive and get you running in good order, but it may take an hour or two to transfer your data.
8. After installing Leopard, take the time to check everything to make sure all your applications run properly. If you need to install third-party software, now’s the time to do it, one at a time, with a little time for testing between each step, until the process is complete.

That concludes eight reasons to proceed with caution in setting up Leopard. Whether you follow my suggestions or someone else’s, you really don’t want to confront this process without a battle plan.

In case you’re wondering, here’s my strategy:

For my 17-inch MacBook Pro, I will use the Archive & Install method, as outlined above. I have only one printer driver, for a Lexmark 780c color laser, which will have to be added once the installation is complete. My Power Mac G5 Quad has two internal drives, and I’m going to erase one of the drives and install Leopard fresh, and, as outlined in step six, use the Migration Assistant to restore my files. This computer has had heavy usage not only for writing, but as an audio editing and streaming station, so it’s high time that I clean things up.

You’ll get the full story of my close encounters with Leopard in this weekend’s Tech Night Owl Newsletter, ahead of posting on this site, so maybe you’ll want to subscribe.

And, once your installation is complete, I’ll be ready for your comments.

With worldwide Leopard coming out parties, and lots and lots of copies arriving the very first day Mac OS 10.5 is out — and maybe sooner if you can believe some reports — you’d almost expect massive upgrades being performed over a period of several days.

This is a vision that seems real enough, although I have to wonder if some of you are going to be highly disappointed that you didn’t wait and take a breather.

But why should that be, considering Leopard has some 316 new features and enhancements that cover the length and breadth of the operating system, from fancy eye-candy to increased levels of security? Whether you’re a consumer or businessperson, surely there’s plenty to delight in, right?

At the same time, just because something is new and does more things that what it replaces doesn’t mean it’s better. I’ll grant that it just might be, and, in fact, I’m highly optimistic that it is.

But I am absolutely going to ignore any comments from people who claim to have somehow been “privileged” to get their copies a day or two ahead of Leopard’s release date, or found an alleged “Golden Master” disk image on a peer-to-peer networking site. You see, I am not going to take any of that stuff seriously. While it’s possible a few copies of Leopard left Apple’s shipping plants early, by error or due to cute marketing trick, I prefer to wait for the real thing.

When that happens, you’ll get a full report here, and, no doubt, you’ll be inundated with Leopard lore for weeks, and perhaps speculation about what member of the feline family will grace the installer DVD for 10.6. Indeed, some mainstream news outlets have already run official reviews of Leopard, since Apple relaxed their confidentiality agreements in a few cases.

But should you “just wait,” as I said in the headline? Well, it’s look at this seriously.

Many of you don’t use your Macs just to update your checkbooks, check email or organize your iTunes songs and videos. You actually use your Mac as a tool to get some work done. So you need something that is predictable and reliable, something you know will stay out of the way and allow you to be productive.

It may well be that Leopard will be all that and more right out of the starting gate. But that doesn’t mean there won’t be some early release bugs that’ll cripple some functions or cause crashes with others. That’s the way with point-zero releases for any product, and when you find one that’s relatively free of such ills, consider yourself mighty lucky indeed.

Even if Leopard is essentially devoid of a show-stopper — which would make it far better than Tiger when it came out — what about your third party software? Do you know that you’ll be able to process your images in Adobe Photoshop, prepare ads, books, brochures and magazines in Adobe inDesign or QuarkXPress? What about the “vertical” applications that you need to run your dental or legal office? Indeed, there are such tools on the Mac, even though a few Windows fanboys would prefer to tell you otherwise.

Moreover, what about really old software that has served you well for years, through thick and thin and despite periodic updates to the Mac OS? Did know that the Classic environment will not be supported with Leopard? That’s not a conspiracy theory or just a guess (educated or otherwise) from some online tech commentator.

Indeed, Apple has confirmed that Classic is history and not just for users of Intel-based Macs: “Classic applications do not work on Intel processor-based Macs or with Mac OS X 10.5. Upgrade your Mac OS 9 applications to Mac OS X versions. Check with an application’s manufacturer for more information.”

All right, so you can add the end of Classic to the loss of support for the G3 and any G4 slower than 867MHz. I also understand that XPostFacto, the little utility that lets you install Mac OS X on unsupported hardware, probably won’t function at all under Leopard. I would hope this isn’t true, for the sake of those of you with older Macs that you want to keep running for a few more years with the latest and greatest.

On the other hand, you cannot expect Apple to support older hardware and software forever. Consider Classic. Mac OS 9 came out eight years ago, and there has been more than enough time for most applications to get some sort of Mac OS X update. That, of course, doesn’t mean such updates will ever appear. Many companies that delivered products years ago are no longer in business, or have exited the Mac platform.

If you depend on any of those applications to run your business, then you should stick with Tiger, at least for now. Yes, some third parties have experimented with ways to run Mac OS 9 on Intel-based Macs, and perhaps there will be ways to make it happen under Leopard. But I’m not expecting miracles, and no doubt there will be performance issues and unexpected bugs. Indeed, XPostFacto, through a great piece of work from programmer Ryan Rempel, had its share of issues, despite help from outside sources. On some Macs, sound never worked properly, and even then, performance was merely adequate.

I realize that many of you will have to confront a serious dilemma here. Do you migrate to Leopard, even if you have to buy a new Mac to do it? Or do you stick with what you have, preserving the old applications that you’ve grown accustomed to all these years.

Then, there’s nothing wrong with having an extra Mac around, right?

I feel like a broken record (you do remember records, right?) when I keep preaching the backup religion, yet when Apple said that roughly 26% of my fellow Mac users backup anything at all, I had to feel extremely disappointed.

The news that only a fraction of that number routinely used backup software was even more frustrating. Consider how many backup applications are available, ranging from Apple’s own Backup, which comes with your .Mac membership, to my favorite, SuperDuper!

Nor is it a matter of ease of use. Most of these applications have simple setup assistants or configuration panes that take the drudgery out of the process. You don’t even have to be around if you just create a scheduled backup, and make sure your Mac and your backup medium are running at the appointed time. Barring a power outage, you’re good to go.

Now one of my long-time acquaintances, a graphic artist, keeps pestering me to set up a backup solution for him. He even pays me to accomplish the task from time to time, and, when I do establish a proper backup program for him, I test it and make sure it’s functional, then deploy it on his network. Alas, a few weeks later, something is broken on his end, and he never gets around to fixing the problem or asking me for assistance.

Then there’s that client who only phones me when he’s panic-stricken about a problem with his Mac systems. Usually it’s the lost data, because he keeps ignoring my advice about backups.

To these people and millions of others, I am grateful that Apple came up with Time Machine. Mind you, I’m not going to blow any nondisclosure agreements and tell you anything but what you’ve read in Apple’s own online descriptions about Leopard’s capabilities. But I’m extremely optimistic that they have found the magic bullet to encourage all of you to perform regular backups.

Best of all, Time Machine will allow you to return to a specific state with a file, folder or even your entire drive. So if an update goes badly, or you trash a file by mistake, you can get it back, just like that!

Of course, you do need some sort of backup medium to store the backup sets created by Time Machine. It doesn’t just happen, nor will those files be stored on your startup drive or partition. Here’s where some uninformed critics are having at Apple for specifying that “Time Machine requires an additional hard drive (sold separately).”

In the narrow-minded view of some, that’s a bad thing, to have a second storage device to protect yourself against losing your data. Fortunately, I do not live in that alternate universe where the laws of common sense apparently do not apply, so I’ll just make a few points.

First of all, external drives are pretty cheap these days. You can get FireWire and USB devices (and some that include both ports) for less than $100 with sufficient storage space to accommodate the needs of millions of Mac users. Add another $100 or $200 to your budget, and you’ll match even the larger drives provided with today’s high-end Macs.

If you have a PowerMac or Mac Pro, you can even install one or more internal drives, if that’s what you prefer, and save a fair amount of money, since you don’t have to pay for the external cases and various and sundry interface components.

All right, I realize backups may be less convenient for a note-book computer, since you don’t want to have to carry around too much stuff for your various travels. In my case, I actually have a spare 120GB note-book drive in a tiny bus-powered enclosure that’s stored in my MacBook Pro’s carrying case. So, you see, I have no excuses to offer. The thing is tiny enough and light enough not to disturb my routine.

Sure, I suppose you can say that Apple is in league with those struggling hard drive companies to sell more product. Indeed, you’ll find some extra drives at Apple’s own retail shops and its online store, and you can bet they make a decent profit from every unit sold.

You might also suggest that Apple wants to put the companies who make backup software out of business. But nothing about Time Machine prevents them from building in new features that might match or eclipse what Apple can do in Leopard.

Besides, as much as I like some of those backup applications, they are, in the scheme of things, abject failures. You see, Apple wouldn’t need to create Time Machine if large numbers of Mac users were using the third-party products. But with market shares of just a few percent of the Mac user base, it wasn’t just the quest for fancy eye-candy to exploit Leopard’s Core Animation feature that brought Time Machine into being. Apple would not have brought those statistics to light if there wasn’t a serious problem that needed a convenient, nearly-seamless solution.

Now I can’t say that Time Machine is the be all and end all of backup software. But if it is as easy to use as Apple’s public demonstrations and online presentations claim, it may spark a much-needed revolution.

So tell me, dear reader, do you have a backup solution that you use regularly to protect your data? And, if not, are you going to try Time Machine — or even upgrade to Leopard? This inquiring mind wants to know.