going from 8.04 to 9.10

[David Fletcher]

On Wednesday 07 October 2009 14:10:40 O. Sinclair wrote:
> thanks for, by now, many advice, thoughts and recommendation. My feeling
> at the moment is to wait until the RC disk is released. Then I plan to
> backup /home to an external (ext3) disk and make a cleansweep
> installation. Then restore what I consider important (mail, documents,
> music, photos etc) but leave old docs and many old .-files and
> .directories behind.
>
> again - many thanks for your thouights and recommendations
>
> Sinclair

My thoughts on this are, because hard drives are now so ridiculously cheap, 
you might as well just back up your data to a flash drive or whatever's large 
enough, stick in a new hard drive, install 9.10 and restore your data. That 
way you've still got your old 8.04 installation.

My reasoning here is that, for instance, certain applications store data in a 
database which for some reason not understood by myself sometimes won't work 
if copied off to a backup then restored to a new (or freshly formatted) hard 
drive. If the latter, then you've screwed up big time. The two applications 
of this sort that I use are subversion and gramps, although the last time I 
did a fresh install to a new hard drive my gramps database worked just fine. 
Apparently it's best though, for safety, to regularly do an export (which I 
believe is like doing a dump of a subversion repository) which can later be 
imported to reinstate the database.

I'm wise to these two examples, but still I prefer to use a new drive and 
leave the old one on a shelf for a few months at least, just to be sure. The 
old drive can then be reused in another machine, or put back in the original 
machine next time the OS is upgraded.

Call me paranoid, but I once dumped my data to an LS-120 disk, reformatted, 
reinstalled, then found that the damned LS-120 was giving read errors. I 
quickly learnt from this experience.

Dave