(Thanks for the head’s up, Butch)

Mountain Lion will be released tomorrow (25th July, 2012) according to the Apple, as announced in their quarterly earnings call.

Mac OS X Mountain Lion has been released!

There’s already a discussion on Butch’s forum post on what to expect and what people are hoping for, so I won’t hijack that, but it’s always worth talking about “how to prepare” for an OS upgrade.

I’ve also created a Mountain Lion page, to share Mountain Lion + Aperture specific issues and tips (just like the old Lion page). If you require support, please post in the standard support forum. To download Mountain Lion, please use this affiliate link.

General Upgrade Tips

Those of you with patience and wisdom will wait a few days (or longer) before upgrading, because there will inevitably be issues that were missed by the testers at Apple (it’s impossible to test every possible scenario). However those of us who throw caution to the wind and live by the mantra “what’s the worst that could happen?!” will be upgrading immediately! So, for those of you like me, here are some tips on preparing for the upgrade.

If you have additional tips and resources to share, post ‘em in the comments please. My tips are mostly specific to Aperture, so if you’re looking for general upgrade help, check these out, and I’ll add more as people post others to check out in the comments.

• 3 Simple Things To Do Before Installing OS X Mountain Lion from OS X Daily
• App Compatibility Table from Roaring Apps

ApertureExpert Upgrade Tips

1. Back up. This should be obvious, but I’ll say it anyway. If you run Time Machine, make sure it runs tonight. If you run Backblaze or another cloud backup, make sure it runs as well. If you are a bit more techie and really want to have a complete mirror of your system that you can easily switch back to, consider mirroring your system hard drive using Carbon Copy Cloner — that’s the de facto standard for a simple, bootable backup.
2. Clean install, or upgrade? This is a question that always comes up. For those of us who’ve been using a Mac since they were beige and boxy, we know that OS upgrades were notoriously finicky and the only way to ensure a clean install was to do, well, a completely clean install. This was an option in the installer, and it was great. However now it’s a lot harder to do that, and a lot easier to just click the upgrade button and lean back and watch. For my money, just let the installer do its thing. I did that with Lion and had no problems (some did, of course, but AFAIK the vast majority of upgrades were painless). You will have a backup should you need to step backwards and try again.
3. Upgrade one Mac at a time. If you have multiple Macs, don’t update them all at once, or at minimum leave one working machine running while the update goes on the others. Should the unthinkable happen, you don’t want both or all your Macs out of commission at the same time.
4. Update your Aperture Vault. If you run the Vault in Aperture, run an update before upgrading. Why? Because if all hell breaks loose, you’ll have an easy way to get your Aperture library back up and running, even on another system, while waiting to recover your main system. I’m not trying to be dramatic here, but you know… sh** happens. And if you rely on Aperture for your daily business, you’ll want to get that back online as quickly as possible in the event of a water landing.
5. If you really wanna play it safe… then copy your entire Library to another system and ensure you can access all your files there before you upgrade your main system. This would allow you to continue working as well while the upgrade happens. After all, it’ll probably take a couple of hours to download and install Mountain Lion.

Buy it here

If you don’t mind, use this affiliate link to buy your $19.99 Mountain Lion upgrade. It puts a few more pennies into the ApertureExpert coffers, thanks.

And go!

That’s really all I can think of. This should be a much easier upgrade than the Lion upgrade was, but that’s no reason to throw caution to the wind.

Good luck, everyone!