Linux Mint Forums

I am now using Mint 10 and everything is wonderful. However, I am really curious to try the Mintified version of Gnome 3 in Lisa. It looks pretty neat!
My question is; I have /home on a separate partition to make it easier to install a new version of Linux Mint. But if I don't format /home and install Mint 12, won't that screw things up because Gnome 3 is incompatible with Gnome 2.3 ?
What is the best way I can reinstall Mint without having to wipe all my data from the /home partition and re-copy everything from the external backup?
Or.. maybe I could use Remastersys to archive and copy everything to the external drive. That may be quicker, but I'm a little nervous because I've never used Remastersys. Any advice would be appreciated.

How small is your harddisk? Once Mint 12 hits RC, I'll install it alongside my current Mint 11 installation. If the final release of Mint 12 works for me, I'll copy any files over from the old Mint 11 /home. Once Mint 13 arrives, I'll overwrite the Mint 11 installation. In the mean time, should I bork my Mint 12 installation--I still have the old Mint 11 working

Nice idea! My HD is 2 TB, so installing Mint 12 alongside Mint 10 would be no problem.
Thanks.

"Rotating" installs as Vincent points out are a very good safeguard. I do that on a few machines.

Also, if you want a readily recoverable external copy of your install and/or your /home (in addition to file backups); create a Clonezilla CD and use it to create some backups. They take no time at all and have only one real rule to follow; the partition that you restore to must be the same size or larger than the one you backed up from.

cheers,
rhodry.

If your only concern is conflicting configuration info between Gnome 2 and 3, you can always just copy all your configuration files and directories into a newly created directory. After the install you can then copy back just the settings you need, (such as .mozilla if you use firefox). Most of the time I leave the configuration files in place, though, and it rarely creates issues. In fact, I just installed Mint 10 KDE in place of Mint 11, just for kicks. I left all the configuration files in place, and had no problems.