I’ve spent the last week MIA. Earlier in the week, I installed Snow Leopard on my Macbook Pro. The install went smoothly. Then I tried to accomplish things.

A real snow leopard would have done less damage. Microsoft Office products would open but were unable to save or print or print to PDF without crashing. I had the same experience with Adobe Acrobat 7 and Photoshop Elements 6. To add insult to injury, iCal and Mail were acting funky, with repeated crashes. I was unable to do anything I need to accomplish on a daily basis. I made sure I had the latest and greatest updates of all the software, but that didn’t fix the problems.

Luckily, I’d backed up all of my personal files before I started the upgrade. But I hadn’t backed up my entire machine, including all those tiny extensions, plug-ins, and shareware apps that add tweaks to different programs and the overall operating system. However, I bit the bullet. I performed a clean install of Snow Leopard, wiping out everything. A clean install means that I then had to re-install all the programs on my machine, from the iLife suite to the Adobe and Microsoft suites. Again, I made sure to download the latest and greatest of everything.

At this point, I’d invested almost 2 days in trying to upgrade my system. Imagine my surprise when I was having the exact same problems as before. I was unable to save or print and my iCal and Mail were crashing repeatedly. I investigated my issues on the Web, but these didn’t seem to be common problems. Seeing as how I needed my email, appointments, and applications in order to run my business, I had no choice. I downgraded. In order to return to Leopard (10.5), I had to do a clean install, again wiping out everything.

Day 3 found me re-installing and updating everything for the second time. Everything worked – almost. Mail didn’t function – it wouldn’t even open. I tried everything I could think of, but ended up making an appointment at the Apple Store. Unfortunately, the appointment was a day or two away.  In the meantime, I had learned a lesson – for the second time. I obviously have a hard head. About a year ago, I had a backup drive give out, and I hadn’t backed up my backup, so to speak. At that point, I gave serious consideration to storing everything in the clouds, but I never followed through. This time around, I’m all about the cloud.

I was already halfway there. My photos are already on Flickr, so I didn’t lose those. My mail is completely IMAP and/or Gmail, which means I didn’t lose too much of it. Using Gmail has gotten me into the habit of not really filing things – I just tag things and sort them into Smart Folders in Mail, but they remain on the server. I did manage to lose a couple of things, but overall I ended up okay.

Since Mail.app wasn’t working, I was able to access my mail through various webmail applications. I seriously considered moving everything into two Gmail accounts forever, and not needing to use Mail.app ever again. Unfortunately, I’m not willing to part with my IMAP accounts and move to POP. In order to use only Gmail and/or Google Apps for Your Domain for all of my email addresss (six of them), I would have to change them all over to POP. So Gmail for everything was out. Alternatively I tried Mozilla Thunderbird, which I disliked, and Entourage. Entourage had some nice qualities, but like Outlook, it doesn’t handle IMAP very well. I was stuck.

As for my iCal, I was already in the cloud. When I made the decision many months ago to switch away from an iPhone, I knew I’d need to sync my calendar and contacts somehow – and it might not be Mac-friendly, so I bought Spanning Sync and started syncing everything with Google. So my calendars were synced not only with my Google account, but with Mobile Me. The only change I made was to install Google Gears so that now I can access my calendar if I’m ever offline.

For To Do/Tasks, I finally broke down and started using Remember the Milk. I know, everyone has been using RTM for ages. I’m behind the curve. Using Gears, I can access it when I’m offline, and I installed the widget to the right of my Google Calendar as well.

I downloaded DropBox and I’m going to use all 2 GB, I think, and I may upgrade to a paid version (50 GB for $10/month). I’ll store all of my client contracts, latest and greatest client updates, and so on out there. I can access it from anywhere and I feel better with my most important files in the cloud instead of just sitting on a backup drive. I’ve already been bitten by that.

My bookmarks and passwords were lost. In a way, this was probably a good thing. I’m now going to be a lot more secure. I downloaded KeePass, an open-source password manager that will store my most important passwords, including passwords to things on my computer (as opposed to just things online). The database file for KeePass is stored in my DropBox. Additionally, I started using Xmarks. Xmarks syncs my Firefox bookmarks across computers. Additionally, it syncs my Web passwords and brought in my Delicious bookmarks as well. However, it does seem to blow up if it tries to sync with Safari, but only if Safari is already syncing with Mobile Me.

So that’s how I’m moving into my own little cloud. I still have a few issues to work out. Logging into bub.blicio.us, for example, only seems to happen if I use Safari and not Firefox. The Apple Store Geniuses played around with my Mac yesterday and rescued Mail.app for me. It was using a Snow Leopard preference file in regular Leopard. So much for a clean install. But overall, I’m finally back in one piece – and cloudlike.

Photo credits: Snow Leopard via CC

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