[Ham-Mac] OT: upgrading to Lion

[Stephen Prior]

Many thanks to both N2ERN and KD7CAC for their comments.  I had no idea
that superduper was so powerful, in fact I'm backing up the Macbook as I
type.  There are some advantages to the superduper approach to upgrading
the Mini since I have more recent versions of Adobe CS on the MB compared
with the Mini and I can see that cloning would be useful in that respect.
However, because I have so much else on the Mini, I have developed cold
feet about the change.  I have thousands of photos on the external drive
tied into iphoto and iphoto doesn't even come with Lion.  I have a large
itunes library also on the external drive, and I know I got into trouble
some years ago when I moved from a G4 mini to the Intel and ended up in a
real mess, with duplicate files everywhere.  And then there are my many
thousands of saved emails, many of them with 'lifesaving' information in
them, passwords, attachments and so on.  I know that I can export my
Outlook files to the external drive but again I get stressy about it!!

Dennis' suggestion certainly appears quite straightforward but I had read
that people were having trouble with the migration assistant going from
Snow L to Lion, I seem to remember that it might have been to do with the
lack of iphoto in Lion, but I could always buy that - it's not dear.

On balance, for me, the latter approach is probably going to be better.  A
question though, since part of the reason for doing this is to de-clutter
and make leaner my OS, if I simply use migration assistant to pull back my
applications and data from Time Machine, will I not pull back all the
stuff that I believe is slowing my machine down now?  By which I mean
applications that I have deleted which perhaps have left bits behind, and
so on?  If not, then my next job before my final Time Machine backup
should be to uninstall/drag to the bin all the applications I don't use.

I know I'm making it all sound rather a matter of life and death, and I
know it's not.  I just hope not to foul up and end up either losing
something permanently or spend hour upon hour manually sorting stuff out.

I've now read that with 2GB of RAM and a 2GHz dual core, Lion runs too
slowly and it's not possible to run more than 2GB in the Mini.  When I
upgraded the MB to Lion I added another couple of gigs to make it 4GB and
I find little difference in speed compared with when it was running Snow
Leopard. So am I doing the right thing? Maybe I should be wiping the Mini
and restoring Snow Leopard!

Sadly, a new, faster Mac is out of the question now I have Elecraft's new
KX3 in my sights!!

Thanks gents for making me think so hard about what I want to do, and the
way to do it,I'm most grateful!

73, Stephen G4SJP