What to back up before upgrading?

[Johnny Rosenberg]

2012/9/9 Phil Dobbin <bukowskiscat at gmail.com>:
> Chris Green wrote:
>
>> On Sat, Sep 08, 2012 at 04:05:41PM +0200, Johnny Rosenberg wrote:
>>> I am finally going to replace my very old Ubuntu 10.10 with the
>>> somewhat newer Ubuntu 12.04 on my main laptop. I have /home on a
>>> separate partition and I have an external backup of all my ”important”
>>> stuff (most of the things kept in $HOME). Whan tryng toplan the whoel
>>> thing I realised that there are some things I want to keep that's not
>>> in $HOME, for example my Gedit snippets of the code snippets plugin,
>>> and they seem to be located at /usr/share/gedit-2/plugins, so
>>> obviously I need to backup that directory too (maybe the whole
>>> /usr/share/ directory).
>>>
>>> What more would I probably want to backup before I start installing
>>> the new system?
>>>
>> I find it useful to make a copy of /etc as there are bits of
>> customisation there, it's rarely very large so space isn't an issue,
>> just copy the whole lot.
>>
>> If you have any databases (mysql etc.) they're in /var which can be a
>> bit of a pain to backup, but those databases aren't anywhere else.
>>
>> Finally if you have any custom software additions in /usr/local you need
>> to back them up.
>>
>>> I will install the Ubuntu 12.04 from scratch, but I'm going to keep my
>>> /home partition, if nobody tells me that it would be a very bad idea.
>>> If so, I will install the whole thing from scratch and then copy what
>>> I need from my external backup later.
>>>
>> That's the way I do it when I want a good 'clean out'.
>
> You may also like to consider doing a full backup with something like
> mondoarchive so if the worst comes to the worst, you can do a bare metal
> restore & ponder over your options.
>
> Cheers,
>
>   Phil...

Well, I have three working computers (and three broken ones) so in
worst case I can always use one of the others while figuring out what
to do next.
Anyway, I just installed 12.04 and I have quite a lot of problems with
it already, but nothing worse than it's totally unusable, for instance
it seems like my own keyboard layout works sometimes and sometimes
not. Now is the "not" situation. No compose key, and the wrong layout
is being used. I guess that will result in a few new annoying threads
on this mailing list.

Johnny