fresh install of fedora vrs upgrade in a nutshell
 

I have 7 and recently downloaded 8. I am thinking since I already have a bunch of photo's stored and vmware running that perhaps an upgrade would be better. googling around I can't actually find that much describing how an upgrade is different then an install. I am assuming my partitioning could remain the same and that all my packages would be updated using the fedora 8 yum repos...so why should I do an install or an upgrade. thank you in advance for your thoughts.

An install makes certain you have a complete set of packages that are tested to work together, no more, no less. An upgrade tries to replace packages, taking into account the dependencies needed. With some Fedora (Core, at the time) releases at least one time an upgrade to a next version was discouraged because of fundamental changes. There's three basic things to take into account: making backups, backups and backups. If you make a backup of your working distro you can restore if you decide to. If you make backups of your config files (usually and mostly /etc) you can later (try to) use them or copy and paste info from them. Finally making backups of your /home makes sure your personal documents can always be restored.

thanks I am in the very long Upgrade process now I will let the forum know how it turns out...