Preparing my Mac mini for Mountain Lion

As we've found out yesterday, OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion is going to be released to the public today.

This year I've decided to take a slightly more relaxed approach — e.g. I don't plan on doing a clean reinstall — but certain steps should always be taken before a major OS update. So here's what I did:

  1. Check if the apps that I use on a daily basis are Mountain Lion compatible. This can be easily done using the site RoaringApps.

  2. Backup my user data with Time Machine. This works pretty fast in my case, because I do TM backups on my Mac mini's secondary internal drive.

  3. Clone my Mac mini's primary HDD with SuperDuper!, twice. I have one backup that goes to a FW800 HDD, usually updated daily and a secondary backup on a USB2.0 HDD that I won't touch until I'm fairly certain that 10.8 works fine. Of course, I checked the integrity of both backups, by booting from them.

That's it. Mountain Lion can come.

Alex Hoffmann @mangochutney