On Sun, 18 Jan 2004, Craig Brooksby wrote:

> Two unrelated questions:
>
> 1) I use RH9, and like Frank and Austin, I see April coming.  I know
> there are many more like us on this list.
>
> The prospect of backing my data up; formatting the harddrive and doing a
> fresh install of [fedora, debian, whatever], then reinstalling all the
> applications I use, and then all my data -- gives me the hives.  I'm too
> much a newbie.
>
> Nothing is worse than getting stuck midstream.  I can't afford it!  If I
> undertake step A in that process, I must be confident of getting all the
> way to step N.  I cannot tolerate bogging down -- this machine is
> mission-critical for me.
>

Then do what I do, create a seperate partition like I did for my home
directory, something like /home1. I been doing this for more than 10
years. Same thing for your data. Put it on another partition and create
sym links to it from the root directories.

Also, I have two "root" directories that I install to. Whenever I install
a new release, I install it to the other root direcotory. This way, my
running system still can be booted until I get all the kinks out of the
new system then switch to it. Then at that time, I keep the old one around
just in case I need it. Granted, this does take twice as much space to
hold the two root directories but it does save me a lot of PAIN of going
thru the new installs.