Upgrade To Snow Leopard & Time Machine

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Level 1

8 points

Upgrade To Snow Leopard & Time Machine

Hi there. I found this subject in an old topic but it was locked so I couldn't respond. So here's a new one.

I have a fairly old MacBook Pro... mid 2007. Came with Tiger. Upgraded to Leopard in 2010 or so. I'd like to upgrade to Snow Leopard now, and do a full install where I entirely wipe clean the existing hard drive.

I've been doing Time Machine backups for about four years on my external hard drive. When I install Snow Leopard on my MBP, am I going to be able to just do simple drag and drop kind of things from my external hard drive to the MBP's hard drive?

For instance, once I've wiped the MBP hard drive, and do a fresh install of Snow Leopard, can I then hook up my external hard drive, open a certain folder, and drag something like Pages from the HD window to the Applications window on my MBP?

Thank you!

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.5.8)

Posted on Dec 3, 2015 2:23 PM

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Answer 1

Pmintz25

Level 4

2,058 points

Dec 3, 2015 2:33 PM in response to Stylez69

Dragging and dropping could cause problems, as these applications and files won't be usable unless they are properly updated. It would be best to have a clean install of Snow Leopard, and then use Migration Assistant to transfer files from your Time Machine backup. Note that Snow Leopard will come with the Apple apps so they don't need to be transferred. You may want to check with 3rd party developers to ensure their software's compatibility and upgrade options.

This is with Migration Assistant:

Move your content to a new Mac - Apple Support

This article is helpful but very time consuming, as it does not use Migration Assistant:

OS X: Manually migrating data from another Mac - Apple Support

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