[Discuss] Backing up the entire software installation

[nancythewriter7 at gmail.com (Nancy Allison)]

Thanks, everyone. All of this information is fantastic. I need to learn a
lot to put it into use, but I am an optimist ...

--Nancy

On Thu, Oct 25, 2018 at 4:23 PM Rich Pieri <richard.pieri at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, 25 Oct 2018 12:12:00 -0500
> Derek Martin <invalid at pizzashack.org> wrote:
>
> > I don't sysadmin professionally anymore, but when I did, I also
> > preferred the same solutiion as Rich:  Don't back up OS and software,
> > do a fresh install.  And I still prefer that.  It's usually faster and
> > easier, and it also gives you a nice opportunity to update to more
> > recent versions of things, if you haven't been keeping up with
> > updates, or even update to a newer OS.
>
> While Debian itself is very easily upgraded to new major releases,
> Ubuntu isn't. Canonical have created tools to run in place upgrades. My
> experience with them is that if you're running a desktop environment
> then the target won't upgrade cleanly. Upgrades to console-only "server"
> installs are more likely to succeed.
>
> Red Hat have created tools to upgrade major releases (EL 6 to EL 7). My
> experience with them is that they are even less reliable than
> Canonical's, requiring the removal of all packages from third party and
> non-default yum repositories and the removal of those repositories. And
> maybe the upgrade will work and maybe it won't, and even if it does
> work you're still saddled with ext4 because that can't be converted in
> place to xfs.
>
> Avoid ext4 for anything important if at all possible.
>
> --
> Rich Pieri
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