To upgrade or not to upgrade....

[Styma, Robert E (Robert)]

> All,
> 
> I have just noticed that FC6 is available and the question is how does
> the upgrade process work?  More specifically, is there anything that
> sets out which directories are not affected by the upgrade process.  I
> have a number of applications installed in /opt and other places and
> wondered if these would be affected. I admit that I probably haven't
> handled that process as well as I could have in all cases, but that is
> due to my own lack of understanding sometimes.  I assume that 
> /home will
> be unaffected, but it is not clear if the files located in 
> some of these
> other locations that are not part of the Fedora distribution will be
> disturbed.
> 
> Any insight would be helpful.
> 
> Thanks in advance,
> 
> Herb
Hi Herb,
  You should of course take a backup of all your data just in case
the upgrade goes sour and you have a non-bootable system.  The partimage
program on a recovery CD works nicely to image a bootable image.
  I always take a back up /etc to another machine as it contains most of
the config files.  While you CANNOT get away with just restoring it, the
files in the directory contain a lot of values you may end up needing, like
DNS server address, the contents of your smbpasswd file if you run samba,
your web server config file, etc.  
In a previous go around of this question, someone mentioned saving the output
of "rpm -qa > /tmp/some_file.txt" to save a list of all the packages that were
loaded on the system.  Someone else posted a slightly more elegant version:
rpm -qa --qf '%{NAME}\n' > /tmp/rpm-pkgs

If everything works perfectly, you might not need these.  

Bob Styma