Any computer user on any platform with any experience is probably just a little wary of major software upgrades. We’ve all had bad experiences that took hours (or worse) to recover from. If you’re lucky enough to have a test machine, your solution is obvious. If you don’t, here’s a safe way to do a “test upgrade” with a minimum risk to your production environment.

1. Using a utility like SuperDuper, clone your production machine’s hard drive to an external drive. Be sure that your external drive can boot your production machine. (Older Macs require FireWire drives for an external boot. Newer Macs can boot from either external USB 2.0 or FireWire drives.)

2. Make sure you have an offline backup of critical data i.e. everything in your User Folder. If you have a second hard drive, that’s even better. Just do a second clone, disconnect it from everything and put it aside.

3. Boot your Mac from one of the external drives by selecting it in the Startup Disk Preference Pane in your System Preferences.

4. Once re-started, drag your internal drive (the drive itself, not the contents) to the trash to unmount it.

5. Install and test the new software, updates or whatever you were paranoid about. Launch not only the new application or software, but also your mission-critical applications (email, web browsers, word processor, presentation program…anything you absolutely, positively can’t live without) and be sure all is good and there are no major issues.

6. If everything is checks out and there are no obvious quirks, terrific! You’re ready to do the upgrade on your production drive. If not, do a little research on the software vendor’s web site, Macintouch, MacFixIt and the Mac 911 forum on the Macworld web site.

OK, here comes the really paranoid part:

7. Re-boot from your internal or production drive.

8. Now, being certain you are making the right selections, *once again* clone your production drive out to the external drive. Yes, you’re about to erase the drive you just upgraded and replace it with a known, working copy of your production environment. (Note: if you had the second external drive in #2 above, you *could* skip this step, but for those who join me in the card-carrying paranoid club, two backups are always better than one.)

9. When complete, disconnect the external and put it aside.

10. Proceed with the upgrade of your production environment, secure in the knowledge that if something would go wrong even a few days down the road, you can return to your tried and true environment with just the plugging in of a cable and a re-boot.

Keep the backup drive(s) around as long as you need to feel comfortable. At the very least you have a complete backup set (or two) of your data, along with applications and everything else.