After a week of running Intrepid Ibex beta on a desktop PC, I completed transferring my data. With the PC up and running, it was time to install Intrepid on my eeePC 900. For one week, I became desk bound as I tested and fix the eeePC to full operations under Intrepid. It took longer than anticipated because of other business I have to take care of. The deadline was the 18th October, when I had to be mobile again. I barely made it, but the last item was fixed a day before the deadline.
Safety first
One thing I couldn’t stress enough. Installing or upgrading an operating system (OS) is potentially hazardous to your health. Most of the time, everything is smooth sailing. But once in a while, a gremlin would throw a monkey wrench into the works, and you could be left crying.
Which is why you should always be mindful to do these things in such a manner that you have an immediate fall back, always. Never ever take a shortcut in this. Too many times, we have whiners coming into the support forums blaming everyone but himself when his upgrade met with disaster.
For some Ubuntu users, the fall back it’s to back-up, double back-up, and triple back-up their data before proceeding. The OS is expandable. These are typically those who don’t do too much customisation on the default installation. If the OS fubared, they simply erase the OS, keep the data, and try again.
Portability
Myself, I adopted a different strategy. First, all my data has to be portable. By that, I have already made sure my mails, contacts, files, etc are exportable to an external storage, and importable into the new install.
Incidentally, with the crazed of cloud computing, many are unaware their data might end up locked to the services they are using. The same goes for proprietary software. I still have the archived corporate mails from one of my previous job, except that the file is useless because I don’t have the application that could open it.
Fast fall back position
Second, during each step, there should always be a back-up system to fall back on. When I upgrade a desktop PC, I cloned the entire hard disk. Then, I upgrade one of hard disk. If I lost the upgrade, I simply swapped the previous clone back in place. In less than five minutes, I am back to where I was, and able to continue with my computing. This is critical if you could not spare a few days without PC to do your work. It meant that at any moment, the potential PC downtime is less than five minutes.
A similar situation apply to a fresh installation. In this case, I saved the time it took to clone the hard disk, but I will loose time later to bring the new installation to the same level of customisation.
When upgrading a laptop, hard disk cloning is harder, because swapping a laptop hard disk is not a simple matter. Instead, when I recently install intrepid on my eeePC, I decided to put it into an external USB hard disk. At any time, if I needed the eeePC for real work, I simply unplugged the external hard disk, and booted back into the existing Hardy installation, which is still intact. Again, potential downtime is less than five minutes.
Of course, I would eventually have to copy the entire installation back into the internal hard disk. I would do this only when I am sure the new install is fully up and running, and everything is working as it supposed to.
Install checklist
Third, with a new Ubuntu version every six months, upgrading could turned out to be a hassle after a while. It is easy to miss a step, or you ended up doing things too slowly because you don’t want to make a mistake. That is why I kept an install checklist. The first time, you need to spend extra time to note down every actions you did during the install. But subsequently, you gained by using the checklist to breeze through the steps.
Every new version of Ubuntu is better than the last. Don’t let the fear of messing up an upgrade preventing you from enjoying the new features and improvements. As long as you adopted a safe upgrade strategy, you would never end up loosing valuable data, or time without a computer to do your work.
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