This inspires me to clean out my hard drive too. I bet I have a ton of crap floating around in here somewhere.
Blargh. There's not enough time left in the day to blog properly.
Whenever I get a new version of Adobe Creative Suite, I completely start over from scratch on my computers. This is a day-long, tedious endeavor that involves making two redundant backups, reformatting my drive, reinstalling the MacOS X, then re-downloading and installing all the software I know and love.
It may sound like overkill for an upgrade, but I learned the hard way when moving from CS to CS2 that Adobe puts a lot of stuff on your machine that you may not ever get rid of. To make sure that everything runs at its best and conflicts are avoided, a fresh approach seems to work best.
As an added bonus, I clear out a lot of garbage that I've accumulated over the years, and have the opportunity to reclaim hard disk space previously occupied by crap.
In this case, 18 gigs of crap.
And no, it wasn't porn.
Not knowing what in the heck had been taking up all that space, I went back through my backup archive.
For two hours.
Turns out at some point I duplicated my entire Applications folder without realizing it, chewing up 16 gigs of hard disk space I never even knew I should have had available.
Yay! More room for porn!
I put a larger hard drive in my XP notebook back in January and decided on a reinstall then.
My recollection is I reformatted and reinstalled four times after that due to XP not liking boot partitions over 135 gigs (or thereabouts). Despite the fact I was sure I'd installed all necessary patches at least twice, the last time I opted for 100 gig boot partition with the remainder set aside as another drive.
Reinstalling is always a lot more fun when it's planned.
I *so* need to clean up files...especially files from blogs I designed in 2005...but I'm always afraid someone will track me down and ask me for something obscure. Thank goodness for my external hard drive!
Posted by Karen Sugarpants on October 21, 2008 | Reply
I have yet to install Adobe Creative Suite on my newish MacBook Pro because I'm scared! After I'm forced to break down and do so I'll refer to this post when it's time to upgrade... Ugh... Note to self.
Posted by Atomic Bombshell on October 21, 2008 | Reply
That sounds incredibly tedious.
I'd love to hear what you think of CS4. I went to an Adobe Users seminar a few weeks ago and the guy conducting it said it was the biggest money grab by Adobe yet. The cost of the upgrade wasn't justified by the changes. For what it's worth he worked directly with Adobe on the first version of Photoshop and other versions—not sure how many affiliates would try to talk somebody out of upgrading.
Computers are such high-maintenance little fuckers, aren't they?
Posted by Coal Miner's Granddaughter on October 21, 2008 | Reply
I know how you feel Sadly I don't have the dough for CS4 just yet. Worth the upgrade?
-justin
Posted by Justin Scott on October 21, 2008 | Reply
Porn is my friend, even though it takes up less than 18gb on my hard drive... ooopppsie... did I actually write that... *snicker*
Seriously, I'm ok with CS3 suite. There's a few cool features that in CS4 that I wouldn't mind, but CS3 has been pretty good for me. Of course, I'm not that skilled in Illustrator yet, so I've not hit the dumb feature functions you and others have hit.
Posted by ChillyWilly on October 21, 2008 | Reply
Yep!
But I didn't want to restore everything, I wanted to start over from scratch, so I didn't recover from Time Machine... I manually went into my Time Machine backup archives and picked what I wanted to copy back to my machine. Software was not copied, but installed fresh.
Just DO NOT re-associate your Mac with Time Machine once you've reformatted... this will ERASE your backups.
Just mount the Time Machine volume on your desktop and manually go in and find what you want to restore.
After you've got everything out of Time Machine volume that you want, then re-associate it with your Mac and it will start a fresh backup of your Mac from the "freshened" state.
I was nervous about this, so I did a redundant backup to an external drive "just in case" I was unable to pull from Time Machine. Though, the method above worked out just fine.
A) Time Machine is Where It's At. I can't remember a time before it, it's that awesome.
B) Why exactly the upgrade? What's the Must Have?
Posted by Paul on October 23, 2008 | Reply
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