What Should I all back up for moving to sid?

[mrchippy]

Alright so, I am growing tiered of having to wait for updates and want to move to Sid. I know that there could be problems (When I last installed arch there was problems with the ati driver not supporting the latest version of x) so I want to back up my system so that if something goes terribly wrong I can restore my system. I want to use clonezilla but am unsure how much I need to backup. do I just need to back up the root partition? or should I also back up the home partition?

[titetanium]

Hi,

Rule #1, Backup everything u want to save.
Rule #2, Backup everything u want to change.
Rule #3, After rules #1 and 2 are done, u may delete or change files.
Rule #4, If you lost anything, it's because rules #1 and 2 weren't followed.....
Rule #5 see #1 and 2.

Any more questions about what to back up?

[mrchippy]

Well I was asking more along the lines of if updating to sid would actually change anything in my home dir

[titetanium]

In general, it shouldn't affect ur home directory. But the files in ur root directory will be affected.
*Edit:
The files in ~/.config may be affected as themes can be broken. ./mozilla gets affected when changing to a new major version, like from 3.5 to v 14, for example. But the vast a majority aren't affected. Does that help?

[mrchippy]

Yea, so if I move to sid and everything goes to bazerk, all I would need to do is restore my root dir to get it back to working condition right?

[titetanium]

I think I didn't quite spell out what I meant by root, I meant in /, like the root partition where your programs and machine settings are stored. The bulk of the programs are installed into /usr on the / partition. So if something goes haywire, u'll need to backup more than just /usr, u'll also need to backup /var as that's where ur installation files are stored as well as the logs.

[mrchippy]

yea I know that. I have a / partition that has everything in it except for /home. I would back up the whole hdd but I just don't have anywhere to store that much data. I would use clonezilla to clone the whole / partition (which has /usr /var /bin /etc ... all except /home) Now, I know that some apps do store some of their stuff in hidden folders in the /home partition, will those be affected when switching to sid?

[mintybits]

It is safer if your /home is in a separate partition. Have you considered shrinking your / partition and installing sid in a gap after it, like 10GB or 20GB? Then you install to the gap, make sure it works. Your old Mint is still usable all this time. Finally, you can convert the old / partition into a /home partition and mount it in sid.

[mrchippy]

my /home is in a separate partition. The split root idea dose not work in this case because I don't want to reinstall. I want to point the source lists in lmde direly to sid then do a dist-upgrade so I don't have to reinstall,

[mintybits]

Sounds like you know what you are doing. You could still do the split root if you wanted by copying the existing root (change UUIDs in fstab, update initramfs) and disable mounting of the /home partition as a precaution during the upgrade. Check the upgrade is ok before mounting the /home partition to it. You could duplicate the sid /home contents first just in case some new app needs some file in there. But if you have backed up the root then no real need for a duplicate.