On 1/4/07, Kelsay, Brian - Kansas City, MO <brian.kelsay@kcc.usda.gov> wrote:
This is exactly why I keep a separate /home directory. You can always
slap it in another system and copy it over or wipe the other partitions
and reinstall and all your crap is still there. Some of your dot files
may need to be deleted, but should still work with newer program
versions. You shouldn't need /var unless you put stuff like your
website in there or files for FTP or mail files. Since I use web mail
and have FTP directory on another drive that is not a problem. I only
save /home before a new system load. And I do back that up prior to
reload, usually. I've only had to save it from the dead once by
breathing life back into the partition table, but then I like a good
resurrection every now and then.
>-----Original Message-----
>From: On Behalf Of Jon Moss
>
>Since Fedora Legacy Project has gone belly up, I've been
>rethinking what to do with the workstation my daughter (a high
>school senior soon to be college
>student) uses. It currently has FC4 installed. I'd like to
>move her to Ubuntu (specifically kubuntu because she likes
>KDE) but I'm not sure if I can "upgrade" to it from FC4. I'm
>going to backup all of her files and photos to a CD or DVD,
>but I'm afraid I'm going to miss something (and I'd rather not
>back up the entire hard drive if I don't have to since the OS
>or distro won't matter any longer).
>
>Has anyone ever done this? Upgrade from one distro to another?
>
>Or do I have to just wipe the hard drive and start from
>scratch (like I would if it had Windows XP installed)?
>
>Happy New Year!
>
>Jon Moss
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This is getting plugged in here at a later date due to sober deliberation.
I am going to raise a proposal here that will also be used to begin a different thread- but is quite on topic here. If one is doing a migration from one distro to another that seems a good point in time to add a "userdata" drive. My admittedly painful lack of detailed "how to" not being of issue here, What's involved in copying /home, /var and anything else liable to have unique "userdata" in it to a new drive, and setting partitions to have the physical location/s be keeping OS on one drive and "your data" on another drive?
Would not having "your data" safe on a totally seperate device lower the worry factor of migrations? And it would seem that Gentoo power users doing frequent emerge updates would have lower risk of losing "their data"
Or am I far wrong?