Weird advice from Adobe Tech Support

[David Roth weiss]

Hi Harry, long time no chat… 🙂

First, use SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner to clone your boot drive to a FireWire drive. Then test it to make sure you can boot to that drive – just hold down the Option button when booting and select the new bootable FireWire drive, and it should boot like a charm. If so, you can now erase the boot drive in your computer without fear, and reinstall the OS and Adobe CC. Time Machine is NOT good for backing up system drives, as apps many times get corrupted, while cloning works perfectly.

Meanwhile, I’d stick with Mavericks for now, as loads of folks here are having issues with Cuda drivers under Yosemite.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[Harry Bromley-davenport]

Hail, O Wise One …

Thanks so much for responding. OK. I will do as you command. I do use SuperDuper to back up my zillions of TBs of movie files to a massive set of eSATA drives which reside in a forest of red hot toasters, so will take your advice and do the System drive the same way and eschew the Nazi Time Machine in future.

And thanks for the advice about Yosemite … I’m moving over to (gulp) Premiere Pro and have received nothing but bad advice from the Adobe people, so it’s a relief to get reliable advice for once. Of course, this presupposes that you have not taken leave of your senses.

Excitingly, I am upgrading from my Mac 2,1 to a 4,1 from OWC. The choice to remain in the Mac dark ages was made simply because I enjoy opening up the side of the Mac towers and fooling around with the wiring when I have nothing special to do. Plus, it’s easy on the wallet. So it’s a huge temporal leap for me of 2 full years in Mac construction – from 2007 to 2009. Phew.

Trust all is well with you and that you are, largely, behaving sensibly.

Pip pip.

Best, Harry.

[David Roth weiss]

I too have switched over to Premiere CC in recent times, and I was luckily not as anxious to test Yosemite as many here, to their chagrin, were. Unfortunately, many of those peeps failed to clone their system drives prior to the Yosemite update, and many were thus hosed when the newest Cuda drivers for Yosemite failed them miserably, or at the very least presented them with horrific display issues.

For the record, I am using Premiere CC 2014 8.2.0 (65) Build, CUDA Driver Version: 6.5.45, under Mavericks 10.9.5, with a GTX 680 Mac Edition, and thankfully I’ve not encountered any issues.

Hope this helps you Harry…

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[David Roth weiss]

BTW Harry, are you still here in LA LA Land, in the hills? If so, we were supposed to get together for lunch years ago, and I’m getting hungry. So, send me an email with your contact info please, to drw at drwfilms dot com.

Later gator…

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[Walter Biscardi]

[Harry Bromley-Davenport] “Vinay: “Hi Harry, Yes, you can go directly to Yosemite 10.10.2, which seems to be working fine. Also, please do not use time machine for any kind of backup and do a fresh installation of all the applications.”

Me: “I should not use Time Machine to back up my system and applications drive? Wow … ? Huh?”

Vinay: “Yes, if possible avoid it for the system files as it may write the old OS files into new one and which might create issue.””

His advice is spot on. What he’s telling you is to NOT backup and then simply replace your applications back onto the system. You need to do a completely fresh install of everything.

Back up your documents and then re-install all your apps from scratch. That’s very standard operating procedure if you’re having serious issues with your system. Start fresh.

Usually you start by installing all of Creative Cloud and then re-installing one by one. If that doesn’t work, then you wipe the system completely clean and start over with all fresh installs.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media

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[Harry Bromley-davenport]

Thank you very much for the response and the advice. Greatly appreciated.

Best wishes, Harry.

[Ht Davis]

I say do both. Clone a backup to restore to, just in case.
Then do a Time machine backup.
They don’t want you to overwrite system files? LOL!!! What a cubicle-robotic jack**s!
When you install OSX, you can go to the recovery environment and use time machine, then elect not to restore your system, just everything else.
Then use an uninstaller like CClean or the like to wipe all remnant of adobe from your system. Most apps will be fine if they are from apple or signed app from the app store. Others may have issues to clean up. You can fix this by wiping them from your system where needed. Like Adobe… …wipe and reinstall. Now you should be set.
CUDA issues have arisen and are currently being addressed. While it may not be perfectly sound to upgrade to yosemite, support for mavericks is being answered with “Upgrade to yosemite”. Even on my macbook pro (2008) 2.16ghz 4gbram 256mb geforce8600m. I use it to edit in CS6 at full prores. Yeah I’ve got the b**ls to do it. It gets hot, but it still works…

[Harry Bromley-davenport]

Many thanks for taking the time to respond. Best, Harry.