GigaOM » Apple

How to downgrade from Lion to Snow Leopard

Darrell Etherington — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 22:23:14 +0000

Mac OS X Lion has been out for a few days now, and I’m quite happy using it on all my machines. But judging by questions I’ve been asked, that’s not a universal experience. A few folks have asked me how to go about stepping back to Snow Leopard. It’s possible, but unfortunately, you may not be able to easily take your current apps and documents with you. There’s a method that does restore your apps and settings, but you’ll need a cloned backup of your pre-Lion drive for it to work.

1. The “best fit” solution

Most won’t have a cloned backup of their drive on hand, I’m guessing. The good news is that performing a clean wipe and install is a good idea for general maintenance of your Mac. The bad news is that in this case, you really have no choice. Here’s how to save what you can and get back to Snow Leopard, provided you have a Snow Leopard install disc (including the one that came with your computer, if it’s a recent purchase). This method also erases the emergency recovery partition Lion automatically installs.

Backup your User folders to an external drive. This should preserve your documents, photos, music, etc. If you store those things in locations not in the User folder, make sure to copy those over too.
Insert the Snow Leopard disc. Restart your Mac and hold down C to boot to your DVD drive.
Go to Utilities in the menu bar once the installer pops up and select “Disk Utility.”
Find the drive in the sidebar where Lion is installed, select it and navigate to the Partition tab.
Click on the drop down menu under Partition Layout and select “1 Partition.” Hit Apply.
Now navigate to the Erase tab and make sure “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)” is selected, then hit Erase to delete all data on the drive.
Quit Disk Utility to get back to the Snow Leopard installer and proceed with the install.
Restore your User folder and documents from your backup.
Run Software Update to get everything current, install your apps from your original install media and update those as well.

2. The “best case” solution

If you managed to clone your drive (Dave describes how in this recent piece) before you installed Lion, which you should do if you haven’t yet taken the plunge, then you can get everything back the way it was.

A popular option for cloning your drive is Carbon Copy Cloner, which is a handy utility to have for any Mac owner. Assuming you’ve done that, follow the directions above to get your drive primed and ready, but stop at step 6 and follow these instructions instead.

Now you’re ready to install Snow Leopard from your Carbon Copy Cloner backup. Here’s how to do it:

Attach the drive containing your CCC clone to your Mac.
Open System Preferences, then go to the Startup Disk preference pane.
Chose your CCC external drive as the startup disk.
Restart and launch CCC, then choose your backup from the “source” menu.
Select your Mac’s internal drive as the destination.
Chose “Restore items from a backup” from the settings pop-up menu and hit the “Clone” button.

As with any major software change, it’s a good idea to have a dependable cloning strategy in place in case you want to revert. But it’s also been my experience that it’s never the end of the world if you have to just do a clean wipe and reinstall, especially if you consistently backup your data from the beginning. Users not yet sure about Lion might consider installing it on a separate partition first to make sure they like it before using it as their primary system.

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How-To: Image OS X and Boot Camp to a New Mac

Andrew Flocchini — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 17:30:13 +0000

You get a new Mac and even though you know you should, you don’t want to start over from scratch and reload the whole system. To make matters worse, you have Boot Camp installed and really don’t want to start over on the Windows side. So, here’s how you can image both OS’s to a new machine using free tools.

You need to download the Carbon Copy Cloner and Winclone software packages. CCC was created by Mike Bombich and has been used for years to clone Mac machines. It is the standard tool for this job. Winclone is made by Twocanoes Software and this is what we will use to image the Windows Boot Camp partition.

Let’s Get Started

Lets start off with Winclone first. After you install the app and run it for the first time, it will tell you it needs to download and install NTFSProgs. Click the download button and install NTFSProgs by following the wizard. The NTFSProgs software allows Winclone to properly read NTFS formatted partitions.

Now run Winclone again and select your Boot Camp partition in the Source dropdown. You can write some notes in the Item Description field if you’d like. When you’re ready, click the Image… button.

It will prompt you for a name and location to save the image to.

Now we wait for Winclone to do its work. When it’s completed, this dialog box will appear. You can now quit Winclone.

Carbon Copy Cloner is a little different in that it can image from your old machine to your new one using a Firewire or network connection. For this tutorial we’ll use the Firewire method. Setup your new machine and connect a Firewire cable between the two Macs. On the new Mac, hit the power button and hold down the “T” key on the keyboard until you see the Firewire symbol on the screen. This boots it into Target Disk Mode where it will act as if it’s just an external Firewire hard drive. On your old Mac we need to launch Carbon Copy Cloner. Your Source Disk drive is your local drive and the Target Disk is the Firewire drive. Click the Clone button and off we go.

After CCC is finished, reboot the new Mac and it should be identical to the original. From here on out, we are done with the old machine. When we imaged the Mac partition, we also brought along the Winclone image with it so now we can restore that image on our new Mac. Launch the Boot Camp Assistant in the utilities folder to create a new Windows partition.

Launch Winclone and click on the Restore tab. Click the Select Image button and browse to your Windows image. Mine was in the Documents folder.

Restore it to your newly created Boot Camp partition.

You know have a new Mac that’s a complete clone of your old one, Boot Camp and all. Windows will probably complain, as it always does, about drivers. Just insert your OS X DVD while in Windows and let it re-install the Boot Camp drivers for you. Of course, starting over from scratch is cleaner but sometimes you just don’t have the time. Proper cloning offers a reasonably quick solution.

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Carbon Copy Cloner Makes Creating Bootable Backups Easy

Charles Moore — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 14:00:23 +0000

One of the things I loved about the old Mac OS Classic was that to create a bootable disk, all you had to do was make a folder named System Folder, drag in System and Finder files and an Appearance Folder, then drag your bare-bones System Folder to a disk — hard drive, Zip, floppy, CD-R, etc — and voila! you were in business. Usually one would add a few more items like Control Panels and Extensions folders, Preferences and Fonts folders, but it was a simple, quick and not-too-dirty way to make bootable disks.

Alas, you can’t do that with OS X and its thousands of tiny, usually invisible files, but the next best thing is disk cloning, which is to make a copy of an existing bootable volume on another disk or drive. This is excellent for backups, but has the added advantage of allowing you to create bootable disks without going through the hassle of running an OS X installer program.

There are several software utilities available that can clone drives, but it’s hard to go wrong with Mike Bombich’s Carbon Copy Cloner, which is offered as uncrippled shareware, with donations suggested if you like the software and decide to continue using it once you’ve checked it out.

Backups Too

Besides drive cloning, Carbon Copy Cloner allows you to do backups and drive synchronization. supporting any HFS+ formatted partition or hard drive (excluding volumes used for Time Machine) as well as FireWire and USB hard drives, including iPods. Note that not all FireWire hard drives are bootable with Mac OS X, and while it is sometimes possible for Intel-based Macs to boot from USB hard drives, it’s not a sure thing.

Note also that for bootability you must format the FireWire drive with the appropriate partition map using Apple’s Disk Utility or other formatting software. The Disk Utility formatting selection sheet (Options button) is self-explanatory.

You can read more about formatting issues and my using CCC to create a bootable clone of my main hard drive to a SimpleTech Duo Pro Hard Drive here.

CCC’s marquee function is cloning one hard drive volume to another, copying every single file to create an exact replica of your source hard drive. Aside from the obvious comprehensive backup you get, if it’s done to a bootable volume you can, say, send your computer in for repairs while continuing to boot and use your standard work configuration until you get your computer back, then just clone the FireWire drive’s updated content back to your internal drive.

Using CCC for Backup and Synchronization

CCC can also be used as a backup utility. When you select a source volume, CCC displays the contents of that volume (including normally hidden items). Uncheck items that you don’t want to back up, select a target volume, and press the clone button. CCC also is smart enough to scan the source and target volumes for files to be copied, and only copy only files that have changed. You can also schedule automated backups.

Another advantage of CCC backups is that rather than using proprietary archival methods, CCC backs up your data to an ordinary filesystem that you can browse in the Finder. To restore your backup data, just select your backup medium as the source drive and the backup destination as your new target volume, and let CCC do its stuff.

Carbon Copy Cloner 3 also supports cloning to disk images, which you can use to restore content to a physical hard drive and produce a bootable, exact clone of the original.

Carbon Copy Cloner 3 requires Mac OS X 10.4.8 or later. Version 2.3 is still available for Mac OS 10.2 and 10.3 users.

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