Upgrading to Pro Tools 8 and Snow Leopard

We have upgraded to Pro Tools 8 and Snow Leopard 10.6 from PT 7 and Leopard 10.5. This is a quick rundown of how we approached the upgrade, and some things to watch out for.

Steps taken:

1. Back up session data. Even though you’re only updating operating system files you don’t want to risk losing any data.
2. Get Snow Leopard and a fresh hard drive. We purchased a Western Digital 750GB Caviar Black from Newegg.
3. Get the Pro Tools 8 upgrade and download any updates that might be available.
4. Install Snow Leopard. We did this by dropping the new drive into the computer, then booting up with the Snow Leopard install disc in the drive. Hold down the Option key while booting to get a menu of boot options, and select the install disc. You will probably need to format the new drive by opening up Disk Utility once the installer has loaded.
5. When the installer prompts you to transfer data from an existing Mac (Migration Assistant), indicate that you want to transfer from a backup or another drive, and select your old hard drive. The migration process transfers all the data under your Users folder from your old drive. This may take several hours depending on how much data you have.
6. Install Pro Tools 8. Note that the installer will upgrade your Pro Tools 7 installation.
7. Install any Pro Tools updates you downloaded.
8. Fire up Pro Tools and make sure all your plug-ins are authorizing. You may have to tell Pro Tools where certain folders when it tries to find certain plug-ins, such as the Komplete plug-ins. Check out this forum post about Snow Leopard plug-in compatibility and Digidesign’s Plug-in and Software Compatibility Grid.
9. Load up a session to ensure everything is working as expected.
10. …
11. Profit.

Items to note:

• You can upgrade your existing Leopard install, but it’s safer to do a fresh install and then migrate your existing data over. That way, if anything goes wrong during or after the upgrade, you can switch back to your old drive with no downtime.
• The Migration Assistant can be run after the system is set up. However, we strongly recommend that you perform the migration right away. The reason for this is that Pro Tools can be finicky about multiple users with Pro Tools data. Your safest bet is to perform the migration at install time.
• You cannot run both Pro Tools 7 and 8 in the same OS install. You shouldn’t run into any compatibility issues running a PT7 session in PT8, but if you’re concerned you can keep your old drive around as a safeguard.

---