21st Oct ’14
Apple proudly offer a free upgrade from Mavericks to Yosemite BUT!!!!!!
I mistakenly installed it on both the MacBookPro and my Mac Mini . all looked good until I received my weekly bulletin from Larry Jordan the video editing guru saying that Final Cut 7 did not work with Yosemite 🙁 . Out of curiosity I opened my Apple video editor FinalCutProX ( FCPX10.09 ) to find it did not work either GRrrrrrrrrr!
I am not a professional video guy and reluctant to spend another $300 on another upgrade of Final Cut Pro when the 10.09 vers. is more than adequate for my needs and is far better than iMovie.
OK so how do you back out of Yosemite and revert to Mavericks ?. It is not easy, and for most of us not possible. After much reading online and research I decided on this path below now in process.
Having had issues with Time Machine I now use Carbon Cloner to maintain a current copy of my Mac HD’s so immediately Yosemite was installed the Mavericks packages were wiped of both drives :(. Had I had a TM backup I may have had the option to restore my system from it to Mavericks?
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For now at least I have decided to leave Yosemite on the the MacBook as I do most of my video work on the Mac Mini.
The Mac mini has 2 x 1 TB drives ( one being the OS X main drive the other being the original server converted to a back-up drive. I have and another couple of 1TB drives for data and media files.
I was able to download the latest vers. of Mavericks via Apple App Store from my purchases – download and have that copied to a 16GB USB and a 2nd copy on a 1TB spare drive.
Reinstalling from the download
Following the Start+ Option boot on mini I selected reinstall OSX .
Next I was taken to a page where the was a choice of OSX downloads 10.10 or 10.8 = Mountain Lion the original OS for the Mini at the time of purchase .
Mtn Lion is 45min download now in process. and is being installed on the 1TB drive.
When done I am hoping that Start+ Option will allow me to boot from the 1TB ( now renamed Mavericks ) and then upgrade it to Mavericks 10.9
This for me looks like better option than partitioning the Mac HD into dual boot as it is already at 70% near the limit of good function. I will be moving as much as possible off there when I get this mess sorted 🙁
The big benefit of Carbon Cloner comes into play here because I have full access to a copy of the MAC HD no mater which OS I am operating from. You would not have that with Time Machine.
Conclusion
The above solution has worked perfectly for me I now have FCP 10.0.9 Motion $ and compressor all functioning on the Mavricks OS X drive.
Incidentally, when I started FCPX the first time it found my media drive and loaded all the editing histories automatically 🙂
I shall now set up a 1 TB drive to use Time Machine to make a Back up BEFORE any major install in future.
Final Thoughts
I see that Costco now offers a 3 TB WD Desk drive for $129 this would be big enough to back up all my HDs with Carbon cloner and free up one of the 1Tb for a Time Machine BU of both the Mini’s OS X’s ( Yosemite & Mavericks ).
‘Nuff said
Tomt