Question about upgrading

[amaresu]

My dearly beloved Ubuntu 9.02 will no longer be supported in 2 days. I've never upgraded before and have been putting it off until I had to upgrade. That time has apparently come. My question is essentially how do I do that?

Do I just hit the upgrade button on the Update Manager? Do I need to back up everything I haven't gotten around to backing up yet? Am I in danger of losing everything? How does this work?


Thank you!

Comments

[zvi]

You should back up your stuff, because you should always back up your stuff, and there's certainly potential for things to go wrong in an upgrade.

In practice, I only ever had one upgrade go bad, and that was an 07 release.

Yes, you push the upgrade button in the upgrade manager. (P.S. You may have to upgrade more than once, to get to the most recent LTS.)

[amaresu]

I know I need to back up my stuff, I just don't currently have any data cds.

Good to know it's as easy as pushing upgrade. That'll make things simpler.

[darkemeralds]

I upgraded from 9.something to 10.whatever not too long ago and it was a breeze. Some tweaking afterwards to get everything back the way I like it, but no real problems.

zvi is right, of course: Backing Up Your Data Is Smart. But I had no mishaps.

[amaresu]

Thank you, that's good to know.

[stellastars]

I'd back everything up, just to be safe.

You may also want to read this article Clean Upgrade before clicking the upgrade button. Essentially, it says that IF there are upgrade issues, they usually have to do with unsupported and/or third-party packages, so it suggests uninstalling them, upgrading, then reinstalling.

Hope that info helps some!

[amaresu]

I will read that, thank you. I need to get some data disks to back stuff up on.

[blnchflr]

I'd back up all your data (remember bookmarks and netbanking keys and such things), and do a clean install - a lot of things have changed, and you'd get a cleaner system as a result.

[amaresu]

Can I back up things like tomboy notes? Because I use those rather extensively and that would be one of my major reasons for not doing a clean install.

[blnchflr]

Ubuntu forums says yes, though I tried backing up to my home folder just now, and couldn't get it working. But in theory, you right-click on the status icon in the panel and choose settings, and you can back up both to your home folder (in .tomboy, I believe) as well as create an online back-up.