pre-upgrade backup

[Matt Price]

Hi folks,

Normally when I upgrade a laptop or something, I back up my data &
just go full steam ahead.  But I'm thinking about upgrading our family
media centre from ubuntu karmic to lucid, and i'm worried there will
be glitches -- the current setup is a bit finicky already, but the
reason i'd upgrade is that some of the stuff is broken anyway (e.g.,
our remote doesn't work at all anymore) and i believe certain issues
have been addressed in the stock kernels & libraries in the last 6
months or so.


Anyway, since the whole family uses this computer, I'm anxious about a
failed upgrade, and am wondering if anyone out there uses a version
control system or something that would let one roll back an upgrade if
it's severely broken.  For instance, I'm thinking I could put /etc
under git or something, and use dpkg --get-selections to get a list of
packages?  And if the things go badly wrong, I could just roll back
/etc/ and reinstall everything from the karmic repos or something.
/home is unfortunately not on a separate partition but all our video
files are, so most of our media should be relatively safe.

anyway, i'd appreciate hearing any thoughts.  thanks!

matt
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