Q: Updating to Snow Leopard

If everything works perfectly, you should not lose any data and everything should resume as normal.

Having said that I don't know about you but I never ever trust my data to everything working perfectly. I always backup. In fact I actually backup everything twice using two different applications for each just to be safe.

Allan

FisherRFC wrote:

 

... do I need to back up my MacBook, ...

It has always been prudent that Before attempting any Major Upgrade you Backup...

Get yourself an External Hard Drive... and create a Bootable Clone Backup of your current Hard Drive...

By far the easiest way to make such a Backup, is to use something like

SuperDuper  http://www.shirt-pocket.com/

or CCC  http://www.bombich.com/

That way, should anything untoward happen during the Upgrade,

you will NOT LOSE ANYTHING.

(Get an EHD that is at least equal to your current Drive...)

Snow Leopard strips out all the PPC legacy code that was present in Leopard, hence the smaller footprint.

A second thing is that in Leopard (and previous) HDs were measured in Binary. HD manufacturers, however have been measuring them in decimal units to make them look bigger.

In SL, Apple switched to the decimal measure.

19GB in SL = 17.7GB in Leopard.

If that's all the free space you have, you need to offload some data - you're lucky it still boots.

I can't find an up to date reference for you to help with how to make space, but I'm sure one of the other contributors will have them to hand.

To update to 10.6.8, download the combo update here; http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1399

I too recommend updating to 10.6.8 using the Combo link posted by noondaywitch

Be sure to Restart your Mac after the Successful Install.

Would then Recommend to Run Software Update to bring Everything else upto date....

If there are a few Updates... Install them One at a Time...

With regard to Freeing Up Disc Space... Have a look here...

what-to-do-when-your-hard-drive-is-full.html

And...  To keep your Mac Happy... See Here...

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1147

http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/maintainingmacosx.html

Mac OS X: About background maintenance tasks