Upgrading to Snow Leopard/Mountain Lion

[vmWareAAA]

I'm on 10.5.8 with Fusion 3.0. I want to upgrade to Mountain Lion (for which I must first upgrade to Snow Leapord), and then to Fusion 5.0. However, I am afraid that I'll lose my existing VM (which I absolutely can't afford to). I can backup my VM to Time-Machine as a safety precaution before I upgrade. But before I do that, I want some communtiy input. Has anyone run across any problems?

[ColoradoMarmot]

Time Machine is completely unreliable for backing up a virtual machine.  I'd strongly suggest just copying it to an external drive.

And actually, I'd suggest not doing an upgrade at all.  You'll probably have much better luck if you do a full clone of your system (Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper), then do a clean Mountain Lion install and migrate from the clone using the migration wizard (if 10.8 can migrate from 10.5 - I think it can).

[vmWareAAA]

Thank you very much for that. I am a PC guy and hardly use Mac. So I don't know what to do, what file to backup, etc. Can you help me with a step-by-step?

[vmWareAAA]

I asked CCC. Hopefully, they'll be able to help with my issue. I guess my confusion is what are the pieces needed for me to successfully be able to do this. And from whom? CCC, Apple or VM Ware. Here is (I think) a list that I've compiled. Please correct me if I am  missing anything.

1 - An external HD (1TB). Preferred brand? From (Costco, BestBuy, etc.)?

2 - CCC Software

3 - 10.5.6 (Snow Leopard)

4 - Mountain Lion

5 - Fusion 5.0

Steps:

1 - Connect HD to iMac and run CCC. This will backup the entire machine.

2 - Upgrade to 10.5.6

3 - Upgrade to Mountain Lion

4 - Pray

5 - If the upgrade is successful, upgrade the VM to 5.0

6 - Pray

The question is, if I am hardly using the Mac side, do I really need a clean install? All I need the Mac side is to start my VM.

[WoodyZ]

vmWareAAA wrote: I am a PC guy and hardly use Mac. ... All I need the Mac side is to start my VM.

If you hardly use the Mac OS X side of things why do you even have a Mac!?  Buy a Windows computer if that's all you really use.  Or you could also just install Windows on the Mac by itself without Mac OS X.

[vmWareAAA]

Any preferance/recommendations between the two, Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper?