Best method to upgrade from 12 to 14?

[kabads]

I've been running 12 happily for a quite a while now (I installed it when it was the latest version of mint). Now, I'm looking at 14 willingly and thinking that I'd like to give it a go. When I upgraded from Ubuntu to Mint, the installation was extremely painless (the disc realised that I had a version of ubuntu and only wrote over that). My /home partition was fine. If I upgrade using a mint 14 iso will the upgrade be so smooth, or will it wipe my /home partition? I'd rather keep that inctact if possible and the thought of backing it all up is a bit of a pain (I've got all the essential stuff that I'd scratch my eyeballs out if it got wiped). What are other people's experiences of upgrading?

TIA
Kabads

[cwsnyder]

You can try updating to LM 13 through your Update Manager, installing all of the updates for LM 13, then updating from LM 13 to LM 14, again through the Update Manager, but going directly would require a re-installation from install media (DVD or thumb drive) and would involve the possibility of losing any information in your /home folder if you do not have a separate /home partition. There have also been reported problems with the Update Manager process, probably because no one wants to do all of the updates on the in-between installation before moving on to the next, and the process would probably also take several hours (as in set aside a day for interactive installation).

Read this post for more explanations: http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/2

[nuncio.bitis]

Yuck. Having to reinstall an entire system every 6 months makes it not even worth the bother. It's too bad they couldn't do updates like Windows.

[Orbmiser]

"My /home partition was fine. If I upgrade using a mint 14 iso will the upgrade be so smooth, or will it wipe my /home partition?"

Depends did you originally create a separate partition for /home? if so then you are fine as did a 13 to 14 and just pointed the install to my /root partition as /home was separate and safe. But the biggest concern is jumping 2 versions is breakage on installed apps and may find a few that need to be upgraded or reinstalled depending on the app of course.

As a Clean Install especially skipping a version is the best course of action.

And I would think it would take a lot more time trying to go to 13 then 14 upgrades install would take hours to do? And a backup your home and clean install and restore /home about an hour to hour and a half.
.

[colyn]

Backing up and doing a clean install is far better than trying to get an update to work right.. This is also the fastest and safest way to do it...