Need some help nuking my HD

[celliott]

I have three Macs- one laptop and 2 desktops that all have various OS upgrades that either directly upgraded over the top of what was already there or came over via Migration Assistant. Each has probably 3-4 (or more) levels of major OS upgrades plus all of the various incremental upgrades. I know there is a lot of junk on each one of them that is left over from other installs plus software that has been deleted or no longer used.

My situation is this- I want to clean things up by nuking the drives and installing a fresh copy of El Cap on them. I know it's going to take some work because I don't want to use migration assistant and bring the left over garbage with it- would seem to defeat the purpose. So, I'll have to reinstall software. I have complete backups of each drive as they stand now.

Some software won't be much of a problem other than reconfiguring preferences, etc once I get them installed. But there is some software that I no longer have the installers for. Some makers have archives available, but some do not. Any solution for that one? Some don't exist anymore and some only offer new versions for software I don't use much and what I have works just fine.

What's the best solution for doing what I want to do? I do understand now why I always just overlay the upgrades- much easier. Thanks for any advice.

[sekker]

How nice - a digital Spring Cleaning!

I'd take an external hard drive and build up your programs. Make that a template build that you can test and then use to clone onto your machines.

The hard part will be the archives. You are likely going to want bootable clones of each old drive just in case you lose something in the cleaning. Could be a single drive with separate partitions.

You will also want to think about your time machine archives. I'd start fresh with new TM backups from the new builds.

This is a little complicated, but your machines will run faster.

Finally, keep in mind that some hardware is not supported by EC like some printers. Just be sure to check before you wipe!

[Winston]

I pretty much agree with sekker's plan, with a few twists.

celliott wrote:
But there is some software that I no longer have the installers for. Some makers have archives available, but some do not. Any solution for that one? Some don't exist anymore and some only offer new versions for software I don't use much and what I have works just fine.

The programs for which you don't have installers seems the biggest issue.

1. Some programs just need to be dragged to the Applications folder to work. They don't install a bunch of extra stuff. Make a list of the applications for which you do not have installers.

2. Get an external drive and do a new 10.11 install on that, while keeping your current OS/Applications/etc. on your Mac. Then copy the applications you for which you don't have installers over to the external drive. Boot from the external drive and see if they work. If not, it could be an incompatiblity with El Capitan, or it could be that something necessary wasn't copied.

This will narrow down your list.

3. Then start hunting for installers. If not available from the developer, you might find them via that Wayback Machine, although my experience with this is not as good as I'd like, as often the pages have links and the links no longer go to a download. But worth a look.
https://archive.org/web/

Another place to look around is Low End Mac, which has a lot of resources on using older things Mac.
http://lowendmac.com/


Also, note that OS X has gotten pickier and pickier about doing a machine specific install. I'd do a separate clean install of 10.11 on each Mac, unless the two desktops are identical (and I mean identical) models.

You can get most of what you need of user files by copying over your Documents, Mail, Photos, etc. from your old User accounts to the new OS setup. However, if you are really trying to clean things up, there will be stuff in your Library folder that you may want, but you might not want to copy the entire Library folder. Browser bookmarks and history come to mind. Pretty much every web browser has a way for you to export bookmarks, then import them into the new setup.

If you are using iPhoto, note that Apple has replaced iPhoto with Photos. Some people are happy with this, and some are not. The last version of iPhoto will still run on 10.11, as long as you don't let Photos take over your iPhoto library. You may also need to copy the iPhoto application over to the new install for the App Store to allow you to update it to the last version. And if you can't get it to update you may need to get help at an Apple Store.

Same may be true if you have iMovie and Garage band - these are still active, but updates for 10.11 may require that they are installed.

Apple has been a bit stupid about this - if you bought iLife separately and the App Store has a record of this it will allow you to redownload it. But if iLife came on your Mac, the App Store won't let you do this, and may not let you do an update. Hence the need for Apple Store help.

iDVD and iWeb have also been discontinued, but should run under 10.11 if you copy over an old version that's updated to the last version.

Once you have the external set up the way you want, and have backups of the internal drive, I suggest you use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the new installation back to the Mac. CCC can, as part of the clone, create a new Recovery partion on the Mac, which you really need, so it's a one-step solution. (The Recovery partion, being a hidden partition, isn't copied directly by CCC.)

Also, if you get CCC, you can use it to copy over items from your User folder in a more automated way, as you can select exactly what it does and does not copy.

Good luck.

- Winston