How to upgrade Ubuntu Studio 14.04 LTS to 16.04 LTS without tearing up the data and configuration.
 

I need to to upgrade my wife's machine from the Live DVD. I have one windoze app running under wine. I have backed up her home directory after running clamscan. I don't have the storage to backup the whole disk.

I have been reading the web trying to find out how to do this and there as about as many ways as their are articles. So, what's the skinny on this little chore. I really need for this to go well or I will be doing lots of listening and my own cooking.

Thanks for you help.
Charlie Bishop

Do you have a separate data partitions on your hard drive, like a separate /home partition? If so, you can put anything you want to back up there and then when installing make sure to leave that partition alone (dont delete it). You should probaly by a external drive or a nas or something to backup your computer every once in a while.

johnnyreb,

As erik2282 has recommended, make sure that your /home partition is backed up to an external hard drive and then do a fresh installation using 16.04 Studio.

Do NOT delete the /home partition when you install 16.04:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...-distro-37074/

It is much safer doing a fresh installation than doing an in-situ upgrade:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/XenialUpgrades

The configuration information for all software is in /home, so nothing should change if you install a new version, or even a different distro. Just use the "do something else" option in the installer and you can install over the old one.

This, of course, assumes that you have /home on a separate partition!

You never need to back up the whole disk with Linux. If all the stuff you have is free, then if it comes to grief you can just replace it. The Windows app is, of course, installed in /home.

Thanks for the help, guys

All is well.
CB