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Comment by k-mcgrady | Hacker News Reader

When I upgraded Windows machines I always went with a complete fresh install. Since switching to MAc I've always just run the upgrade.

What do people on HN recommend? Using this technique to do a complete reinstall, or upgrading?

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Upgrading generally works great with OS X; generally the upgrade process blows away the system/OS files and leaves your stuff untouched. In the normal case, "your stuff" is well compartmentalized away from system files so stuff works nicely.

With that said, as a developer sometimes it can be handy to do a clean install. For example, if you have any custom kernel modules, these will certainly be blown away in an upgrade. Additionally, developer tools installed in /usr/ can be interfered with, and in general the probability that something will be incompatible/broken is a bit higher.

I'm currently running a system that started with 10.7, upgraded to 10.8, then the 10.9 betas, and finally 10.9 GM. I've had no issues.

I seem to remember a story some OSX version ago about a user who lost her RSS feeds in mail though. There were still there somewhere hidden in her home settings but there were no more accessible through Mail because the features was removed.

So be careful anyway.

I've read posts from folks who started at 10.1 and upgraded all the way to 10.8 without any issues.

Unfortunately, this is not possible; 10.4 was the first release of OSX that supported Intel, and 10.5 was the last to support PowerPC. Alas, you can't have a machine that was on 10.1 that can also run 10.8..

That said, you can definitely chain update your way from 10.4 to 10.8 without issue, and similarly from 10.1 to 10.5. The latter case is a little tricky as many of the machines that ran 10.1 were not deemed fit for 10.5 (e.g. the G4 Cube variants), but there are workarounds.

Perhaps he means used these systems through upgrade/transfer installs via a firewire system transfer or similar

You can move bootdisks (physically or just the image) between a power based Mac to an Intel based mac. The OS is upgradable from 10.1 to 10.8, you just have to swap hardware around Leopard to make it work. :)

I routinely have coped my bootdisk from Mac to Mac as I upgraded systems.

Good point, I forgot about this.

I should know this actually, I built OS X Live DVDs back in the day...

I was fine with just upgrading except for Lion -> Mountain Lion. A lot of little nitpicks were fixed after I did a clean install.

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