Hi Ladies,
I love this community and see there are so many active helping hands 
I have a question...
I am running Lion (I think) on my iMac and I bought Adobe CC this weekend when it was on the Black Friday sale. I got a message saying PS needs El Capitan OS to work. This leaves me in a quandary. I have so little space on my computer, I use it for work as well as scrapping and I am in the middle of a ton of projects. I am afraid of introducing a nightmare situation if I update now.
What would you do?
I downloaded EI Capitan OS a few weeks ago, haven’t noticed much difference to mac, although I don’t really use the mac to its full potential. I use it for my coursework, browsing net and my digital scrapbooking. Only thing that annoyed me is it too ages to download the update, but my mac is working on a wireless connection so that didn’t help.
I would definitely save all projects and backup to an external drive, but then I would go for it. the sooner you are able to use CC the faster your projects will be done!
plus if you really do not have the space the mac will tell you. I updated my macbook pro and LOVE IT! good luck!
I have to watch the budget, so no upgrading right now. In a perfect world I could get a second mac and one would be dedicated to scrap...LOL. I have to work out a plan to not interrupt my work, though. Thanks for the tips.
@Sandy - El Cap is a free download, if that helps any! I haven't downloaded it to either machine yet (Mac Mini desktop & my Air laptop) but that's mostly because I've been busy (& more than a bit lazy about doing anything I don't absolutely have to!). My MiL & various friends have downloaded it & have had no problems.
That said - do you keep everything on your computer's hard drive? If you do, PLEASE learn from my massive crashes with nothing backed up (twice - once on the desktop, once on my laptop, I guess I'm a slow learner). Almost everything was recovered but the advice I got from our great local Mac shop (after they got done with the whole "what do you mean you don't have a backup?! You need a backup NOW!!) was that photos, music, & videos take up MASSIVE amounts of room & should all be kept on an external drive. As a result, I'm running two external drives on both machines - one as Time Machine & one to hold everything I work with (including all my music - I directed iTunes to look for the external drive rather than the hard drive). Both machines are super fast now, have lots of room to run almost anything I want, AND everything is backed up twice (Time Machine on the desktop also backs up the external drive holding my entire life
).
If you don't run a backup for Time Machine, that is absolutely the first thing you should get asap when your budget permits. Back everything up before you download anything (this will take a while if you've never done it before - all other backups will be very fast - set them to do this every hour automatically). And if you already have a TM backup but not a second external, I very highly recommend getting one & moving all files off your machine. I have almost nothing on my Mini's hard drive other than software/apps now & am still amazed at how much faster everything runs.
As for what I have - I run two WD My Book externals on the desktop (one 1 terabyte for my files & one 2 terabyte for Time Machine) & two WD My Passports for the laptop (these are pretty small because I keep nothing on the Air but we have a spare WD 1 terabyte My Book (the old Time Machine for the desktop) so I might re-purpose that for the laptop.
These go on sale pretty regularly at the usual places - Best Buy, Staples, & Amazon so watch their ads & grab them when you can afford them.
And if you already run external drives for TM & files - never mind.
PS To anyone without backups & externals - it is much, MUCH cheaper to buy a couple of external drives than it is to pay to recover your files. I know this from painful, & expensive, experience.
Thanks, Sarah...I use backblaze, so my files are good. However, I should backup my fonts for sure. I am hoping to have a quiet weekend soon to purge the machine of a lot of old files I no longer need. I feel better about the process now.
Sandy - I had to look up backblaze
I figured it was cloud backup but I hadn't heard of it!
I am not very trusting when it comes to others keeping my backups which is why I mentioned Time Machine (which I LOVE). I know a lot of people who lost all or most of their files when the government shut down MegaUpload & while I know that is an extreme event, I figure some of these sites might well go out of business at some point so I keep all my backups here - or in a few cases, keep my backups to the online ones here. After two massive crashes, I'm totally anal about backups & storage!! I may learn slowly but I do learn.