9.10 to 10.04 upgrade question

[mrdfield]

Hello, I am running Ubuntu 9.10 and want to upgrade to 10.04 when it is released.
I have chosen to upgrade as I have a lot of music ,files ,and pics that I dont want to lose as if I did a clean install, By reading thru these forums it seems most suggest a clean install over an upgrade,But as I have stated I have to much to lose.
My question is as I have read on these forums that I should do a back up even though I am choosing the upgrade could someone explain in very simple terms how to do this ?
I am very new to Ubuntu/ Linux and really enjoy this OS , I am not really into all the tech stuff I just surf the web check email and listen to music so when it comes to all that stuff like backing up and other such things I have no idea on what I am doing .
Any help from someone would be greatly appreciated
Thank you
Dave

[chip_munk]

That one got me many moons ago. Since then I always had my /home on it's own partition. The system files all went on another partition. Now I can upgrade, or even change, the system without losing any of my personal data (music, videos etc) since I never format the /home partition.

If that is not your current situation then you'll have to make a note of which applications have data you will not want to lose, which files you will not want to lose (eg music, video, photo, browser bookmarks etc.) and then copy these to another media such as DVD or a separate HD.

It's your choice as to whether you want to try and keep configuration settings for the common apps you use. Sometimes it's useful, sometimes not, especially if the app has changed considerably between versions of the OS.

Once you've copied it all, check your system again to see if you've forgotten/missed anything.

When you then do your clean install .... partition your HD so that you have a dedicated /home partition. This is where you would then store all that precious data so you don't need to do this the next time an upgrade comes up.

Of course you "should" be doing regular backups of your data anyway ... right. :lolflag:

Hope this helps somewhat.

Cheers
Chris