Hi, John: I've upgraded. But, then, I'm the sort of person who just prefers to be updated. Since you didn't ask for package/security related reasons to upgrade, I'll not address anything about that. John J. Boyer writes: > Well, this may not be an answer you'll like, but I think the best answer is advance planning. Perhaps the most pwerful thing to recognize on this subject is that you don't have to repartition your hard disk in order to upgrade your installation. You can format some of its partitions, and leave others as they are, to be precise. If your /home is a separate partition, for example, your data there can easily be preserved. Ditto for /usr/local. I now tend to keep /home and /usr/local as separate partitions just for this reason, that I don't want to lose the data there during a system upgrade. If your /usr/local isn't separate, but contains data and software you want to keep, simply copy it to a directory on /home. My usual procedure is to routinely copy my /etc to a backup directory on /home just as a security measure against doing something stupid as root with some file there. It hasn't happened often, but it has happened, that I've needed to retrieve something from that backup. If you have many users, for example, you can take the bottom part of /etc/passwd, and /etc/shadow, the part with your user data, and do catt [backup-passwd-file] >>/etc/passwd after the installation to restore those users on the new system. Of course, you need to do that for shadow as well. I also do it for groups, fstab, exports, hosts, host.allow, host.deny, and several other files. I don't overwrite the new files with the old, because I allow that there may be differences that are important in the new installation. But, I've never had a problem using cat >> to put my additions back after an upgrade. > > Thanks. > John > > > -- > Computers to Help People, Inc. > http://www.chpi.org > 825 East Johnson; Madison, WI 53703 > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > Blinux-list@redhat.com > https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list -- Janina Sajka, Director Technology Research and Development Governmental Relations Group American Foundation for the Blind (AFB) Email: janina@afb.net Phone: (202) 408-8175 _______________________________________________ Blinux-list@redhat.com https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list