From the course: Final Cut Pro X Weekly

Upgrading safer - Final Cut Pro Tutorial

From the course: Final Cut Pro X Weekly

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Upgrading safer

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- [Jeff] Welcome to Final Cut Pro X Weekly, this is Jeff, Nick's not here, and I'd like to talk to you this week about upgrading safer. Basically, it's the idea that there's some preparation you should do before you upgrade your OS or upgrade Final Cut X. I want to go through those rules, I want to show you about backing up Final Cut X just in case, I want to show you how, when you go to upgrade your system, you should check and repair it, using the macOS Recovery partition, and last, that Time Machine isn't enough. If you really want to be safe, you'll clone your entire system. Let's start with the rules. Biggest rule people miss is never to upgrade mid-project. Yes, Final Cut Pro X, the whole team is amazing. But all you need to have happen is there to be some little bug that's particular to you. You've upgraded everything and now you can't go back. So before you upgrade, you want to backup everything, and the biggest thing you want to backup is that library for Final Cut X. If you really want to be safe, you'll take your actual live project and you'll export an iXML of it. I'm going to show you how to do that now. So here, I am inside a Final Cut Pro X. I want to go up to the file menu, I'm going to choose export XML, and it's going to export the project that's currently loaded right now into the timeline. When I choose export, I get my dialogue box, and I'm going to choose current project 1.8 and export this out. You can import that back in to a brand-new library, and it's going to retain everything. And this is the only way that you can kind of revert back. You're going to want to export an XML for every single project you're working on. You'd go into a brand-new library, import this XML, and go ahead and link up to your media. This is the safest sort of meta-way to keep all of your information, at least in your project itself. Now, we run into a problem with Final Cut X itself. I want to have a full backup of the application, and the problem is, you can't download old versions of the app. So here's Final Cut Pro in the app store. I can open it, I can look at the version history here, but what I can't do is I can't go to an older version. So what I do about that is make a copy out of my applications folder, and I put it on another drive and then zip it up. You can see on my system I have the last versions of 10.0, 10.2, 10.3, and maybe one day, 10.4. So I've backed up Final Cut, compresser in motion, and then I actually right click and compress them and label the older version. That way I can go back. Let's talk your Macintosh. Say you're switching from High Sierra to Mojave. What you should note before you go to do that upgrade is that you should run the Mac OS Recovery. Now, the problem is, the disk utility can't do a repair of a live operating system. While I can run this first-aid on my boot system, the problem I'm going to run into is, it's got to lock that system, and it won't actually be able to do repairs. It'll force you to use the recovery partition. So a different way you might choose to work is this. You might boot with command+R and get into the recovery partition. Now, this is a screenshot of mine, because I couldn't do a screen recording. This now allows me to target my system and do a first-aid on it. Whenever I run into a problem, I repair it twice. I like to do this first-aid before I do an OS level upgrade, so I guarantee my system is working as well as it can. This, for me, is the easiest alternative so I don't have to do a full clean install. The last thing I'm going to suggest to you, before you do any of this stuff, and you should be doing this all right now anyways, is to clone your system. And the thing about cloning your system is that you could use the disk utility from that Recovery Boot mode, but I prefer to use Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper!. I run this on weekly basis, and in doing so, it means that my system is totally cloned, and the beauty of that is, if you upgrade Final Cut or you upgrade your OS, something goes wrong, you can go to that clone and use that instead, going truly back in time better than Time Machine does. So I'm going to go ahead and hit clone, and it's going to sit back and clone my system into a disk image, and in doing so, I have a perfect copy of my system. And I do this, as I said, on a weekly basis. This has been Final Cut X Weekly. Thanks for watching.

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