Upgrading to Mountain Lion questions..

Spudhead

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So with the release of Mountain Lion almost upon us, Ive been wondering about the upgrade process seens as Ive never upgraded an OS before. Always clean installs on Windows and this is my first Mac (had it since November).

But presumably when I buy, download and install Mountain Lion from the AppStore do I have to back up all of my data first? ... Eg my pictures, movies, music in iTunes and all my apps/games that I have downloaded or installed then re-install all of these once mountain lion is installed?

Or does it do some clever thing where I don't have to backup a thing and it leaves all my apps in place and data and just upgrades itself to mountain lion? Apologies if I haven't worded this correctly as Im in abit of a rush typing this but had to ask the question as its been bugging me for a few days now!
 
It is wise to backup prior to upgrading, but not a necessity. The upgrade will leave all your existing files and apps intact.

Prior to the purchase of my latest Mac I'd not done a clean install of OS X for more than 4 years and had done two successive upgrades of the operating system without issue.

The only thing that you should be warry of is incompatibility of older apps with the new OS, but the developers of applications should have had plenty of time to sort this out prior to the new OS being officially releashed to the public. Check that all you applications are up to date prior to the update.
 
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Thank you, sounds good to me.
 
I have been pondering the same,I must admit,I'm quite looking forward to the new os,dying to see the airplay of my mac!!!
A few weeks ago,I couldn't get the concept,but after an atv2,and AirPlay using the ipad2,I now,get it.
 
Thanks for that link, although now Im sorely tempted to back everything up and do a clean install of Mountain Lion, not sure if it will be worth it though.

But if not I suppose I could always upgrade to Mountain Lion, then at a later date make a bootable copy of ML from AppStore and do it that way at a later date and do a clean install as I am buying a new SSD soon so will be better to clean install on my new SSD I imagine.
 
I pondered the same on my first OSX upgrade from Snow Leopard to Lion; I found it hard to let go of those old Windows habits. In the end, I decided to follow the advice that a clean install was not necessary and I found the upgrade a simple, painless process.
 
I installed Mountain Lion on my MBA last Sunday. I ensured my mba was uptodate with current software. I than just made certain I had a current and complete timemachine backup. I also ran disk utility to verify/repair permissions. And copied the "Install Mountain Lion.app" app to an external drive.

The whole upgrade took less then 30 minutes.

Oh and this was on a fully encrypted disk as well. Very smooth and no problems at all.
 
Thats good to know, I'll have to look into what this time machine is aswell. Ive never even used it or opened it on my MBP but see so many posts about it all the time.
 
Thats good to know, I'll have to look into what this time machine is aswell. Ive never even used it or opened it on my MBP but see so many posts about it all the time.

Same here. I hope im right by saying its just an external hard drive that the mac backs everything to, and when used on a new computer it will restore everything exactly how it was before?
 
It is a fantastic context sensitive automatic backup system with the easiest way to restore items. That latter part is often forgotten in backup products.
 
Will any external hard drive do?

Yeah, but it will obviously need a suitable interface with which to connect it to your Mac with. USB or Firewire are both suitable. You will need to format it via Disk Utility. Format the drive as Mac OS Extended HFS+ with a GUID partition scheme for the best compatibility. You may want to simply create a partition on an external drive for Time Machine use rather than using the entire disk for Time Machine?



 
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I have been pondering the same,I must admit,I'm quite looking forward to the new os,dying to see the airplay of my mac!!!
A few weeks ago,I couldn't get the concept,but after an atv2,and AirPlay using the ipad2,I now,get it.

I've been trying Airplay with 10.8 and it's working really well, but be aware that not all machines with 10.8 can use Airplay, it looks like they must all be 2011 onwards, seems to be something to with the Intel CPU, have a look here for more info.
 
So can you envoke the Mirroring from Mac via AirPlay directly from the ATV at all, or do you need to click on the option on your Mac itself. The former will be perfect for running headless and not needing to remote in to see the screen and click AirPlay. Please, please, please tell me its possible...

:)
 
So can you envoke the Mirroring from Mac via AirPlay directly from the ATV at all, or do you need to click on the option on your Mac itself. The former will be perfect for running headless and not needing to remote in to see the screen and click AirPlay. Please, please, please tell me its possible...

:)

You need to turn it on via the Mac to be mirrored:



 
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Nice one cheers. Especially love the Kermit the Frog VoiceOver on the second video. ;-)

I plan to use RowMote for control of my Mini, so I guess I need to set up a keyboard shortcut for enabling AirPlay and that sorts out the issue. Will see very soon, once ML is released.
 
So can you envoke the Mirroring from Mac via AirPlay directly from the ATV at all, or do you need to click on the option on your Mac itself. The former will be perfect for running headless and not needing to remote in to see the screen and click AirPlay. Please, please, please tell me its possible...

:)

No sadly you can't m8, you just have an AirPlay icon in the menubar the same as on iPhone/iPad, when you click it you then select the AppleTV, you can't go the other way from aTV to Mac.
As you say using Rowmote and having it headless is an option.
I dabbled about with it to get my desktop on the living room TV and it worked well, but took me a little while to get it full screen, there are a few options that were in the system preferences that I wasn't too clear about, but got there in the end. ;)
 
Is it possible to turn AirPlay mirroring off all together. I'm currently running 10.8gm but even when turning it off from the menu bar it keeps randomly connecting to my Apple TV. It immediately disconnects again but is very annoying when it happens every 5 mins and I'm watching a film.

EDIT: temporary fix I've now added a password to AirPlay on my Apple TV so that it does not interrupt playback of movies but I now have lots of password requests on my iMac.
 
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Is it possible to turn AirPlay mirroring off all together. I'm currently running 10.8gm but even when turning it off from the menu bar it keeps randomly connecting to my Apple TV. It immediately disconnects again but is very annoying when it happens every 5 mins and I'm watching a film.

EDIT: temporary fix I've now added a password to AirPlay on my Apple TV so that it does not interrupt playback of movies but I now have lots of password requests on my iMac.

That's a weird one m8, I haven't had that at all, the only time I have connected to my aTV3 is by manually enabling it in the menubar.
I'm running GM also and reading today it has been confirmed that the released GM is the same build as the retail so I wouldn't think there would be any changes if it is a bug until 10.8.1.
 
f0wlerUK said:
That's a weird one m8, I haven't had that at all, the only time I have connected to my aTV3 is by manually enabling it in the menubar.
I'm running GM also and reading today it has been confirmed that the released GM is the same build as the retail so I wouldn't think there would be any changes if it is a bug until 10.8.1.

It was fine before I had used it but now it won't stop popping up. I'll just keep the password turned on on my AT3 for now. If the rumours are correct it will be released on Wednesday and I'll give Apple Tech Support a call.
 

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