I have been running Mint 10.10 for a long time and wish to upgrade. Simple enough? Read on.
I have a Raid 5, dual boot and spare 500gb drive. I want to upgrade my Linux Mint to Mint 14, but if I lose my Win set up and 20 years of files I'm sure my DW will slaughter me.
Please advise.
I can clone to my spare 500gb drive just as security.

Then can I upgrade one disc and partition without losing my dual boot and maintain the raid?

Would it be more efficient to rebuild from a clone, including my Windows stuff as well?

Re-installing everything will be almost impossible due to it's overall age.
I would be grateful for any advice.

I would backup everything to a totally different hard drive for both systems. This does mean that you have to get an extra external hard drive or some other hard drive. Then attempt to do the upgrade.

Even though the Windows partition normally won't be altered, I would backup ALL operating systems.

The commands to upgrade mint are as follows. You must run as root in a terminal.

apt-get update -Vy

Allow this to complete.

apt-get dist-upgrade -Vy

If this works, you're done. The upgrade is complete. If you get some error messages for the second command re-run it this way.

apt-get dist-upgrade -Vym

You MUST have a good connection to the Internet & you should also have your computer on a battery backup so that nothing can turn it off suddenly while upgrading.

You can also use the DVD to do a clean Mint install and then restore the data using the backup and restore utility if there is no good Internet connection.