Fedora 11 upgrade
 

Im not sure how common an internet upgrade is with the Fedora distro,but I tried that. I did not download the ISO file and burn it to DVD to upgrade. I ran the download upgrade option straight off the site and it killed me. Missed a lot of files to upgrade and it killed my nvidia drivers.I eventually wiped out my linux file system and did a complete reinstall of 11 off a clean copy. That finally worked.It was a nightmare and i lost a ton of info because my backup isn't recognized by the new OS. I like Linux a lot but WOW! what a pain!

That's more common than you might have thought... upgrading is still fraught with quite a degree of danger. I always format and reinstall completely - read too many posts where what happened to you... erm... happened! :)

Then again, it is just good practice to backup, and VERIFY the backup you made, before doing anything potentially system threatening, like a full upgrade... Also, IMO a backup isn't a copy - only once you have at least two copies of the master data, on different mediums (like a flashdrive and a DVD - electrical and optical) which are physically separated by at least a few meters, do you have a "backup"

For work, we have 7 copies here - four copies are on the same site (several meters separation) and three "disaster" copies are seven kilometers away, 1 optical, 1 magnetic, 1 electrical...

a messed up "upgrade " is VERY common i have never had one work using the dvd or "preupgrade" program .
i keep checking ,cross my fingers , and run it .
Then do a fresh install .

I have upgraded from Fedora 9 to 10 using the DVD, worked fine. And I have upgraded from Fedora 10 to 11 using preupgrade, which also worked fine, although it took very, very long.

Which is why clean installs are still officially strongly advised. Setting up a separate /home partition can make doing a clean install fairly painless. However doing a clean install once a year(Fedora's support life) on a lot of machines is pointless. I migrated those machines over to Centos(five year plus support life).