Upgrade Trail

[David Fletcher]

On Sun, 2012-04-15 at 00:21 -0700, Bill Vance wrote:

> Using apt-get/synaptic/et al, is there a direct path there,
> or do I have to go through each intervening one to get to
> the wanted distro?
> 

For some years my strategy has been:-

Hard drives are cheap so there's no harm in having a spare one on the
shelf.

So, take a backup of everything that's needed, swap to the spare drive,
do a complete wipe and fresh install, restore the backed up data to the
new installation.

The drive containing the old OS version then goes onto the shelf as the
spare. It still holds everything from before the upgrade so if you find
you missed something important, it's not a disaster.

If you install a hard drive caddy system the drive swap operation
becomes trivial, although the fans in these can be ultra cheap rubbish
so be prepared to replace them with better ones.

Dave