How do I update my system software without losing my older Adobe applications?

Question

Hi. I purchased and own InDesign CS5.5, Illustrator 10.0.3 & Photoshop CS6. I want to update my iMac system software which currently runs Mac OS X version 10.6.8. But if I do this, I think it will render my expensive software unuseable.
I cannot reach a real human from Adobe to inquire about my options in this matter. Does anyone have any advice for me?
Thank you!
-Kathleen !

Answer 1

I cannot reach a real human from Adobe to inquire about my options in this matter. Does anyone have any advice for me?
Yes, lots
Your suspicion is correct. If you update your OS it is almost guaranteed to keep at least some of your old Adobe apps from functioning. This is especially true if you move to Yosemite. Telling us your target OS is important, because I think much (maybe all?) of your software would still work under Lion, although many people report issues when upgrading the OS while leaving Adobe apps installed.
In your shoes, what I'd do (and what I always recommend) is that you figure out some way to keep Snow Leopard going, to house your old Adobe apps. There are two common ways to do this:
1) Take a snapshot of your entire Snow Leopard install, back it up to external disk, format your drive, install Yosemite, then install VirtualBox or other virtualization host, and run your Snow Leopard snapshot there. The performance hit on running Snow Leopard as an app inside of Yosemite is not that bad, assuming you have enough RAM. "Enough" here is 16 gigs. It's probably doable at 8, but I can't say for certain.
2) Split your disk. You can take your current hard drive and split it in half, or some other fraction. Leave Snow Leopard as-is, then install Yosemite on the other half. You can hold down a key at bootup to choose which OS you want to run.
There are plenty of other options, but it's hard to guess what you need if we don't know what other apps you are running, the OS you want to upgrade to, why you're upgrading, and so on.