Upgrading to Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite as a Developer

Isn&#x27;t it safer to use the &quot;ditto&quot; command for the restore?<p>sudo mv &#x2F;usr&#x2F;local ~&#x2F;local<p>then merge it back in<p>ditto -V ~&#x2F;local &#x2F;usr&#x2F;local<p>That way it should merge all the files from the backup into the new folder (and show you what it&#x27;s doing)

Hi all. If you want to feel better about your worst upgrade experience, I should inform you that mine started : Saturday, October 18, 2014 at 19:00 (local time Greece) and at this time is still stucked in : &quot;2 minutes remaining&quot; :)<p>Thank you Apple. I think nobody will ever beat this time!!! Not even windows v100!!! I think I&#x27;ll go for the Guiness Record...

Turned on cmd-L to see where it&#x27;s at and I&#x27;ve got several pypy versions and MacTex in there, hundreds of gigs of files. Based on this new information which I so desperately wish apple made me aware of before running, I expect my install to take at least overnight. thanks apple for your consistently declining level of software quality!

Just a warning - after 6+ hours (not sure exactly as I went to sleep) my Yosemite install failed because the log buffer was full. I can&#x27;t say for sure that this would not have happened if I hadn&#x27;t left the log viewer open, but I would recommend closing the log window when you&#x27;re not actively using it.

I upgraded this morning. Estimates where way off. (Thanks for the CMD+L hint!) After a few hours, the Mac just reinstalled everything again. Waiting again for hours with &quot;1 Minute&quot; point. Worst upgrade experience with OSX ever.

Upgrade on a late 2013 rMBP took about 18 minutes (2min faster than the estimate).<p><pre><code> $ find &#x2F;usr&#x2F;local | wc -l 24825 $ du -sh &#x2F;usr&#x2F;local 644M</code></pre>

If for some reason, you didn&#x27;t move everything, you can see exactly what&#x27;s taking so long. For me it was copying every NPM package on my machine.<p><a href="https://twitter.com/kevinSuttle/status/513446291968651264" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;kevinSuttle&#x2F;status&#x2F;513446291968651264</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/kevinSuttle/status/513447060499341313" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;kevinSuttle&#x2F;status&#x2F;513447060499341313</a>

I had 32k files using up 8GB in &#x2F;usr&#x2F;local, and the time spent on &quot;2 minutes remaining&quot; was about 45 minutes. In retrospect, I&#x27;m happy that I didn&#x27;t waste any time on special preparations. One thing I learned is that the ⌘L log window blocks progression from restore to the next reboot; I lost about 15 minutes that way.

I wish that I had read this before upgrading. I have tons of stuff installed via Homebrew, and after two hours of &quot;2 minutes remaining,&quot; and seeing in the logs that it was &quot;restoring&quot; stuff from &#x2F;usr&#x2F;local, I gave up and went to bed.

Not sure why the article hasn&#x27;t considered this, but after moving &#x2F;usr&#x2F;local to another location and doing the Yosemite upgrade... you can always move the newly created Yosemite files&#x2F;directories in &#x2F;usr&#x2F;local to your old local, rather than deleting them.

Just a note: if your shell is set to something in `&#x2F;usr&#x2F;local` (e.g. `&#x2F;usr&#x2F;local&#x2F;bin&#x2F;zsh`), remember to set it back to `&#x2F;bin&#x2F;bash` before doing the move.

It seems you really must move it to ~&#x2F;local or similar as the article points out. Moving to &#x2F;usr&#x2F;local.bak seems to still copy the files one by one into recovered items during the last stage of the installation.

Good to know that it could take hours. Upgrading to Yosemite on a Macbook Air (about a month old) and it&#x27;s taking a few hours so far. Didn&#x27;t check &#x2F;usr&#x2F;local but will just let it go for now.

How large was your &#x2F;usr&#x2F;local folder before upgrading? Mine is currently at 12GB and I wonder whether I should try to reduce it even more.

Well, at least I now know what the problem was! (I&#x27;m a Homebrew user, and I was at &quot;About a minute remaining&quot; for more than an hour...)

took me &gt;24 hours without completing. I rebooted into the recovery partition, mounted the disk, moved aside the stuff in &#x2F;usr&#x2F;local and then re-installed. I dread to think how long it would have sat there burning crud into the LCD

Is there any stopping the update once it&#x27;s started to move stuff around to get a better start...? Probably not, eh?

Super handy Jim, big thanks. Full install completed in 40 mins with no issues with brewed packages. ;)

Srsly, how did Apple miss this problem? This affects good percentage of Mac users…

I just upgraded, and Macports had no problem. (Macports uses &#x2F;opt)