Lucid Lynx is due out next week - before you install/upgrade...

[standingwave]

Why not backup regularly, not just when it's upgrade time?

Precisely. Last November I had a drive just fail without warning. I started the computer and the BIOS was unable to see any media. Now I had three drives and it couldn't see any of them. Couldn't see the optical drive either. I was thinking my controller had died but I started pulling drives and soon determined that the WD 1TB was the culprit. It didn't even have an OS on it but whenever it's plugged in, it prevents the system from seeing any drive. Apparently something to do with the SATA interface electronics. It's still sitting here on my shelf if anyone has any bright ideas. But thank the FSM for my backup. There's really no excuse these days with drives being so inexpensive.

[Irihapeti]

Why not backup regularly, not just when it's upgrade time?

I agree. In fact, just after I'd posted this I remembered that I hadn't backed up my system (as distinct from home directory) for some time, so I did it.

Hopefully, if people can be encouraged to backup before upgrading, they might continue to do it at other times.

On the other hand, dreams are free.

[beercz]

I backup all the time - 3 or 4 times a day - minimum.

I have a lot of clients' data on my pc and laptop.

And in almost 20 years of IT professional experience I have never lost anything important.

I use rsnapshot and some custom written scripts, together with cron to backup.

[Ebere]

Why not just copy the entire hard drive ?

To another hard drive, or DVDs, or flash drive, or whatever you have that would hold the entire contents...

Isn't everything going to be there, if you need it ?

[CharlesA]

You can image it, yes. Makes it a bit of a pain to access files without restoring.

[ttshivers]

You can image it, yes. Makes it a bit of a pain to access files without restoring.

Clonezilla is a great tool to image your hard drive or even make an exact clone of it on another hard drive.

[Ebere]

BTW: Not something that has ever worked for me with windows.

First of all, windows will not let you copy the entire system area of the hard drive.

Once you do copy what you can, you have to reinstall windows somewhere, and copy your saved stuff back in.

But from what I have seen, you can copy the -complete- hard drive, with ubuntu.

And if you copied it onto another bootable drive, you'd have your entire system back.

Maybe I am missing something essential, but that is what it seems like, to me.

[CharlesA]

Clonezilla is a great tool to image your hard drive or even make an exact clone of it on another hard drive.

Indeed. I use it all the time.

The only downside to doing it on a data partition is that you need to restore it to the same drive, or a different drive to access the files.

I usually just rsync the data drive and image the main OS drive. Works like a charm for me.

BTW: Not something that has ever worked for me with windows.

First of all, windows will not let you copy the entire system area of the hard drive.

Once you do copy what you can, you have to reinstall windows somewhere, and copy your saved stuff back in.

But from what I have seen, you can copy the -complete- hard drive, with ubuntu.

And if you copied it onto another bootable drive, you'd have your entire system back.

Maybe I am missing something essential, but that is what it seems like, to me.

If you copy just the files from a Windows drive to another drive, you would need to recreate the MBR data. If you do a dd of the same drive, to the other drive, it would boot fine, since it does block-by-block copying.

Clonezilla works fine for Windows, since it saves the MBR and whatnot.

[ttshivers]

Yeah. I am not that techie so I just stick to clonezilla.

[stmiller]

sudo do-release-upgrade