pre-upgrade backup

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, May 26, 2010 at 07:36:07AM -0400, Matt Price wrote:
> 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!

It would be much simpler (and faster to recover) to just do a disk
image/backup before you upgrade.

Downgrades are just not an option.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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