Backup 8.04 / Upgrade 8.10

Hi,

i would like to give 8.10 a try, now that the beta1 is out. Can i upgrade from 8.04 with liveUSB? How can i safely backup my fine functioning 8.04? Thanx

 

1. You can't upgrade via liveUSB; installation from the liveUSB writes a new filesystem image to your disk obliterating the old one.

2. Safe backup method #1:
Boot from a liveUSB that contains an appropriate backup program and use it. Will probably take a snapshot of your install; restoration do a complete overwrite as in #1.

3. Less safe but less space-filling backup:
Copy the contents of /home and /etc to a safe place. You can restore by reinstalling Ubuntu-8.04 and any extra programs you installed, then copy /etc/and /home over to the restored U-8.04 to get back your settings. Works more than 95% of the time for me on my desktop PC.

4. Even less safe but probably doable:
Upgrade via apt (or synaptic). Edit /etc/apt/sources.list replacing "hardy" with "intrepid". I do this all the time - sometimes it works well, other times it doesn't. Depends on what changes were made between releases.

 

Thx, that is quite a detailes information. Is there a good backup program on board? Or just dd?

 

I'd go with dd, the SSD is only 8gigs after all, and since you can mount the image on a loopback it's easy to check old configs and whatnot...

In case someone reading this isn't too familiar with dd, you can dump the image over the network to some other un*x box by running something along the lines of:

dd if=/dev/sda bs=4096 | ssh user@host dd of=/path/to/file/sda.img bs=4096

 

Do i have to use the dd commnad with "count=1" (boot sector)? Is a 8gb usb stick ok for backup? Is unmounting of the SDD necessary? Has anyone used this method #4 for update via apt? Thx again....

 

If you want you can follow the instructions on my blog as to how to prepare an 8GB flash key to do backups of the AA0. A full backup will do a dd copy to a gz file on your flash key. Look here for instructions and to download the image file you'll need to "burn" your 8GB flash key ...

http://customdesignlinuxblog.blogspot.com/

Cheers.

 

hey, thank you!

 

Check this one http://www.aspireoneuser.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=4867&start=0&st=0&sk=t&sd=a