[Ubuntu-US-CA] Least painful way to upgrade 12.10?

[Akkana Peck]

Josh Berkus wrote:
> b) is there a good way to back up my entire HDD image so that I can
> revert to 12.10 if things go south?

Alex Mandel writes:
> 2. move your home directory to a separate partition then you only have
> to write over the / with the fresh install, home directory can stay in
> place. (this could be done with a large external too, bit of a shuffle game)

If you put your home directory on a separate partition, you can keep
several / partitions around. Then you can do a fresh install of
14.04 to one of the spare root partitions without risking anything
on your working 12.10 setup. Root partitions don't take up much space
at all (allow 15G or so) compared to the size of modern hard drives.

And thanks, Alex, for the suggestion of dpkg get-selections --
I haven't been doing that on new installs, but it's a great idea.

        ...Akkana