Breezy upgrade over Hoary

[Markus Amersdorfer]

Hello,

> I do not want to wreck my currently working system, so now I am a
> little apprehensive about upgrading.

While I can't comment on the Breezy upgrade process myself yet (still
running Hoary, but any rough glitches would really surprise me),
I usually simply make a backup copy of my Linux installation before
running any such major changes as a release upgrade. Here's one way of
how this can be done:

- Boot a Linux live CD (Ubuntu's, Knoppix, whatever)
- Mount the system partition to /mnt/system
- Mount a partition with enough space for the copy to /mnt/backup
- Create target directory:
    # mkdir /mnt/backup/system-backup
- Change into the system directory:
    # cd /mnt/system
- Make the backup:
    # find . -xdev | cpio -pm /mnt/backup/system-backup
- Unmount the filesystems and reboot the machine normally
- Perform the upgrade :)

Should the upgrade process really mess up the system or its
configuration, the process described above will restore everything
again ... plus you always have the original files from e.g. /etc/ at
hand easily to compare against, which is nice to have.

Further notes:
- The boot-manager might need to be adapted / re-installed after
restoring the backup
- The above works great if you have distinct partitions for system
files and data -- otherwise your data will possibly be copied as well.
- The dates of any directories are set to the current date/time. I have
never encountered any issues with this, though. (Dates of *files* stay
as they are.)

Hope this helps...

Cheers,
Markus

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