OS X Lion Upgrade
I finally took the plunge last night and upgraded my main work machine to OS X Lion (having previously upgraded a laptop and a Mac Mini without incident some months ago). I waited until now for two reasons; I wanted to wait for at least one update (OS releases are seldom trouble free, especially significant upgrades) and I wanted to wait for the key applications I use to catch up to OS X Lion.
Having met the two upgrade conditions I delayed further while I established a sound backup of the machine (no small feat in itself as I have a couple of terabytes of data on this machine). Key data on this machine (about one terabyte) is already backed up to my CrashPlan service (highly recommended) but I wanted a more complete backup before doing an upgrade, welcome 12Tb of QNAP TS-659 Pro II goodness (RAIDed and used as a TimeMachine backup disk).
Backups duly done it was time to bite the bullet.
As with the other machines the upgrade process was easy and relatively quick (about 30 minutes). The OS X Lion upgrade tool took care of everything and the machine restarted as expected. I have many small applications that start on login (things like iStat, Dropbox, Concentrate, Hazel, Growl, Butler and a variety of application helpers). These all started without problems with the notable exception of SnapZ Pro. The license key announced itself out of date and I had to renew it (not a problem, it’s a free replacement and the tool provides a simple ‘renew’ button). I would not even mention this if it were not for what happened later (see below).
So, everything looked okay after the restart. The machine was very sluggish and the disks in the machine were being hammered. This, it turned out, was because OS X Lion rebuilds the Spotlight database, reindexing the whole machine, a four hour process on my system.
While the Spotlight index was being rebuilt the system also performed a TimeMachine backup (a mere 18Gb of data to be backed up) and I took the opportunity to reinstall the Java JDK that the installation of OS X Lion had removed (actually, it’s not removed, but OS X Lion stores the JRE/JDK in a different location so I took the opportunity to update to the latest 1.6 Java build [I know, 1.7 is more recent, but I'm developing to 1.6 at the moment]).
Once indexing had finished (and the machine was no longer I/O bound) I figured I would try a reboot without closing any applications (I generally have a long list of applications open all the time) just to see how Lion coped with restarting them all when it rebooted.
It didn’t. At least it failed on three counts. SnapZ Pro decided to complain about the license key again, Notebook complained that the license was already in use, and another minor issue (well, it turned out to be minor, but it was a major issue when it happened) was that my DevonThink Office Pro databases failed to reopen (DevonThink just hung on restart). I killed the unresponsive application and restarted it without a problem. I decided to forge ahead for the moment and hope that this was just a minor glitch.
I then upgraded all the system software. This involved another (small) OS X Lion upgrade because the original installer I used was the one I downloaded months ago and Lion has been updated a couple of times since then.
This upgrade was much faster (as one might expect) and the machine rebooted perfectly. I had deliberately not closed any applications and everything came up as expected (neither SnapZ Pro or Notebook complained and DevonThink reopening without incident). Big smiles and sighs of relief all round.
The disks were still active but not significantly. The UI response was a little sluggish, but by now it was about one in the morning so I called it a night and left the machine running (I leave this machine on 24×7 anyway).
The following morning I came in to find the machine back to its snappy self. Everything working tickety-boo and a Safari update pending. Why not? I performed the installation, which required a reboot (again without closing any applications) and sure enough everything shutdown and restarted perfectly, I was right back were I left everything after the restart.
All-in-all a very satisfactory outcome, so far…
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