downgrade OS and iphoto database

Question

Level 1

10 points

downgrade OS and iphoto database

G'day

I foolishly upgraded my imac to ox x 10.9.5 from snow leopard. The upgrade to maverick ( I think it is called) did a database upgrade of some kind to my iphoto library. I want to remove maverick and reinstall snow leopard from scratch to get a clean image. But I fear that my iphoto library won't work. And possibly my timemachine backups won't work either.

Is it possible to reinstall an older operating system, and have my iphoto and timemachine backups still work or am I screwed?

Thanks

iMac24 but want 27", Mac OS X (10.6.7), Sun SPARC 10 lover

Posted on Mar 1, 2015 3:27 PM

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Answer 1

léonie

Level 10

194,647 points

Mar 1, 2015 3:56 PM in response to Rocker-65

. I want to remove maverick and reinstall snow leopard from scratch to get a clean image. But I fear that my iphoto library won't work. And possibly my timemachine backups won't work either.

What kind of backup do you have?

Do you have a full clone of of your Mac from before the upgrade or full Time Machine backup with all applications and the system library and user library, your iPhoto library, etc? With a full backup you can revert to a previous system, if you erase your Macs, reinstall Snowleopard, and then use the setup assistant to migrate all apps and data from your backup. See this link: OS X Mavericks: Revert to a previous OS X version

But if your Snow Leopard backup is incomplete, it will be difficult to revert. There is no lossless way to downgrade an iPhoto Library to a previous version. In that case it would be more profitable to find out, why your upgrade to Mavericks went wrong and to solve the issues you now are having.

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Answer 2

Rocker-65 Author

Level 1

10 points

Mar 1, 2015 4:51 PM in response to léonie

Interesting thought. I don't have a clone taken prior to the update. I looked at my time machine backups, it doesn't say wether its a full system backup or not. But I haven't manually run a full backup or clone. So I think I'm out of luck.

I will read the revert to a previous ox x version information. Maybe that will fix this mess. I just don't want to loose my photo's, or backups for that matter.

Tks

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