I am running Ubuntu 9.10 and at the moment everything works fine. The problem was that when I clicked to update a month or so ago my computer would not load into Ubuntu (see topic http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ubuntu-793841/ ).

I could not recover from this with my limited knowledge of linux at this point and had to reinstall and lost everything

I was wondering if I could click the update link but have some way of backing up my entire setup so that I don't risk losing it all again? Or is it safe to update now? And what did I do wrong last time?

I don't plan to do anything till I know I am safe to update but any help is appreciated

cheers,

Alex

I had the same problem several times with ubuntu and that's why switched my desktop to Linux mint which don't do this weird thing after updates. At least so far I haven't faced that. I think anyone can't say for sure that nothing will go wrong when you upgrade again.

I am not saying anything against Ubuntu but may be for me it doesn't work out. But you could just use the live cd to boot and do the backup in windows drives, doesn't have to lose anything.

An excellent tool for backing up your whole setup is remastersys.
Website is here: http://www.geekconnection.org/remastersys/ubuntu.html

You (probably) didn't do anything wrong. Grub2 is still full of holes - why did Ubuntu force (the majority of) it's users to use beta software ?.
And the bootloader of all things.

I avoid the "losing everything" by using a separate /home partition on Ubuntu. Re-install if needed doesn't trash your personal stuff. Helps at upgrade time too as you can install the new release fresh (the upgrades have always been dodgy), and keep your personal setup intact.
You shouldn't have needed to re-install, but grub2 is "difficult" to deal with compared to the classic grub.

In the same way Linux is harder than Windows: familiarity. In time, GRUB2 will become more stable, and you'll get used to it. Eventually, you'll laugh at the pointless complexity of GRUB legacy.

yes grub2 is a pain in the rear especially if you want to boot several linux versions from one hard drive, some of which use 'classic' grub. Still, regarding updates I tend to regress to the command line and use apt-get which seems to be safer. This suggests we should be using Debian instead!

Fred.