On Sat, 7 Mar 2026 09:35:41 +0000 Chris Green <[email protected]> wrote: > > > Am I likely to hit any big snags? Obviously I will back things up > carefully (we have daily incremental backups of /home and /etc > anyway). Do I need to do much more than make an image of /home and > then install Debian 13 and then copy /home onto the new install? >
One specific point: /home contains a lot of the users' configuration data, some of which may not be compatible with different versions of the applications. I would not just drop the old dotfiles into the new /home without testing before and after each application for functioning correctly, or if the files are short text files, examining them. In some cases, as you say the installation is old, you may want to configure from scratch anyway. Obviously the data should be safe enough to transfer. Ideally, either broken/incompatible data or configuration files should not cause an application any difficulty, they should just be reported, but some applications don't handle invalid input files gracefully. -- Joe
