On Sun 01 Jul 2018 at 15:09:24 (+0000), Curt wrote: > On 2018-07-01, Gene Heskett <ghesk...@shentel.net> wrote: > > > > This is also a strong recommendation to use a new drive whenever > > upgrading your distro of choice, you can always mount the old drive and > > copy your usefull things to the newer one. One of the reasons my email > > corpus is so big, some folders go back to 2002.
1991 here, but my oldest emails are printed on fanfold paper. The earliest outlines how to email from the University of Waterloo to the UK and vice versa in March 1986, when email addresses still contained lists of gateways and UK ones were written backwards. But in any case, this technique does not work with laptops. > Apparently she had two identical partitions running Wheezy, wiped one, > installed Stretch on it (while leaving 'home' untouched, which contained > her user templates, 66 of which have gone AWOL). > > This raises the question as to why the other Wheezy partition can't provide > the > missing 66 templates, as well as where the latter might be hiding on the new > Stretch install, which question is exactly the OP's question--but > unhappily I don't know the answer. Most likely the same reason as would be the case here: /home is shared between the two installations. However, doing this makes backing up the dotfiles/directories all the more important as there's often some incompatibilities between different versions' configurations. After installation, I run software with a blank sheet and see what differs from the last installation. I cope with differences using little shell scripts that juggle symlinks, usually in .config nowadays. I use the codename as the big switch, by putting # stretch as the first line of sources.list and reading it into the environment. Over the years I've needed it for audacious/xmms, ffmpeg/avconv, firefox/iceweasel, mc, mutt, etc. and it's also useful in ~/.bashrc because commandline options often change too. Cheers, David.