Update 7 Total and abject Failure

[mhwelsh]

I am really an oldie newbie, so please be patient.
Do you remember the last catastrophe with updates? They changed the system and they were so successful the I did not bother to preserve my latest data this time! Sod's law it crashed - big time.

The operation went smoothly and the first clues were when I went for a restart after updating and the screen display, "Cancel -Restart -Shutdown etc", had little boxes instead of characters. The second clue was after the restart the Konsole did not respond to the cursor - an input of 'su root' did not encourage the cursor to move. Attempts to run Firefox caused the display to become unstable.

Subsequent restarts showed that the bars at the bottom and top of the screen were empty, empty. Restarts were carried out by killing the computer.

As many of you will be aware my data was still present at this time, but, yes, I reloaded a two month old image and tried again!

I would like to know what I should have done to resolve the problem and perhaps we could generate a 'How to' for use by people in the future.

martin welsh

[Orbmiser]

Yep why I also use Redo backup and back up my Linux partitions before doing any major upgrade or once a month kind of affair.
Some choose to just backup their home & settings. But I choose to snapshot partition as only way to be sure.

Just too many variables that can bork the system.

So no. 1) Back up partitions before doing major upgrades.

And that means not just personal data. That can be automated to back up home,program and settings without leaving the desktop.
But when major upgrades bork something down in the layers of your OS that isn't going to help getting back running.

Clonezilla is chosen by many and I found it confusing and more than I needed which was a simple way to back up my partitions.
Redo Backup works for me. [url]http://redobackup.org/[/url].
Same under the hood as Clonezilla just a lot easier to use.

2) Don't be in a hurry to update. Wait a day just because it's available doesn't mean you Have To right then.
Wait a day or two read the forums see how the upgrade went. And gives you time to schedule a backup.
I would rather make a more informed decision when taking a step then because an icon told me too.

Went to SolydK because it was a Debian rolling monthly updates which fits my needs better.
As coincides with my monthly backup plan.
So now I wait for the update pack and backup just before updating it.
Unfortunately they only do KDE or Xfce and don't have Cinnamon.
But was doing Mint 15 KDE but got tired of doing the Clean install every 6 months.
.