I've been burned by major rev upgrades, so I never even attempt them anymore. I don't attempt to do a full restoration either, first because it's too hard and second, not doing so allows me to purge apps and other stuff that I never use anymore. After all, the only way to find out if these apps are useful is to download them and try them. Sometimes I can judge that they are useless and purge them, but usually I think "that might be useful someday", and the promptly forget about them. If I was a better housekeeper, I would clean useless stuff off as I go,
I do a "tar -cjvf" of /home and /etc to compress and list all the files to a big usb drive. I double check to make sure everything is there, reformat, install and then add back files as I need them. I copy the listing of the tar file to the new hard drive so I can grep for stuff quickly without having to mount the usb drive, When I think of an app I want I just "apt-get install" and I'm done with it. Good Luck. -- Patrick Timlick On Sat, Oct 24, 2009 at 8:26 AM, Paul Heinlein <[email protected]> wrote: > On Fri, 23 Oct 2009, John Jason Jordan wrote: > > > Then there's the issue of user configurations. Sure, config files > > for applications are in ~/, but what about the configurations for > > the desktop and for Ubuntu itself? And do those application config > > files include all the plugins, add-ons and extensions? Will Firefox > > remember the theme and plugins I have installed? Will Openoffice.org > > find my Zotero library so I can add a reference to a term paper? > > The easiest way I've found to check this sort of thing is to create a > new user account on the machine, log into it, and see what works and > doesn't work. > > It's amazing what problems will disappear once you have a clean home > directory. :-) It's also amazing what things don't work... > > That doesn't fix all your problems, of course, but it'll give you a > good idea of what is functional and/or dysfunctional with your current > user-specific configurations and workarounds. > > > Of course, I will do a full backup beforehand. In fact, I will do it > > several times - to a hard disk, to DVDs, and again to the hard disk > > using a different backup strategy. > > Perhaps $$ is really tight for you these days, but if it's not you can > > a) buy an external enclosure for your current hard drive, and > > b) buy a new hard drive to install your new OS. > > Once you've got the new OS installed, then mount your old hard drive > and copy what you need to your new /etc, /home, or whatever. > > Plus, you can always chroot yourself into the old environment to do > things like query your old apt database or see what library versions > are used by your old binaries. > > If the new hard drive is considerably larger than the old one, you can > even dd the old drive to a file on your new one -- and mount/chroot it > just as you would an external drive. > > -- > Paul Heinlein <> [email protected] <> www.madboa.com > _______________________________________________ > PLUG mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug > _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
