Getting ready for ubuntu 12.04 LTS
 

Kind of a multi-part question. I am using ubuntu 11.04 and want to go to the long term support of 12.04 after it has been in use a month or two. I want to do a clean install.

What do people recommend for a backup that I can use to restore all my "stuff"-music/pictures/documents/tomboy notes etc. after I do a clean install?

I am thinking about purchasing a 1 terabyte USB external hard drive to use for this task. Also hope to use the same hard drive to back up small amounts (pictures mainly) of my wifes iMac.

thoughts?

I am currently reviewing Helmke, Hudson and Hudson's book Ubunut Unleasehed which covers my 11.04 chapter on backups.

any suggestions?
and yes I should have already been backing up...

Good idea to have external, removable backup. I'm using D-link DNS-323, with two 1 TB drives. I'm not sure I would recommend you go that route. Understand 1 TB drives are now using 4k sectors, not native to any existing system. There are problems with these drives, I know only too well. Consider 500 gig drives, they are all 512 bytes per sector. If you want to know more, do a littel googling. WD's 1 TB drives are 4k per sector.

Now, as far as the install, clean is the way to go. You do not have to format /home or any other partitions with user data. You only need to format / ( root ). In theory, all your stuff will still be there after the install. This assumes /home is not on the same partition as /. If it is, then that is the point you need to separate /home from /.

There are lots of USB enclosures out there with drives in them. Most are formatted as NTFS. You might want to do some googling on external drives. Not sure I would do that with a linux system.

My d-link runs linux, so both drives are ext3. The d-link also runs a samba server, so backups from any other system; Windoze or a Mac works just fine. Not the fastest, but it works.

I would be happier if I had known about the 4k sector size issue, and bought smaller drives.

The d-link is a nice toy, very hackable. There is a site dedicated to hacking d-link sans. Lots of fun....

Thank you. I did not know about 4K per sector thing. I just assumed get as much storage as you can, but maybe not.

I do not understand your other point. My home is not is root. But if I do a clean install w ubuntu I thought it would erase the entire HD and not just overwrite root. Am I wrong?

If your /home is on another partition, there is no need to format it. I have installed many times leaving the /home/myuser/ as is. All I do is re-create my user id on the new install, home will be there, along with all your files.

Only problem I ever had was the user ID number from one system was different than on another system. ie, Slackware start assigning new users at 1000, my Mandriva system starts at 10000. So, that can create a problem. I also found out you can change the number (don't remember now how) assigned after the fact. This gave me permission problems on a dual boot system. I had to change the user number on the old system to match the new one. I have the /home partition mounted on my Slackware system, since I had a lot of files on the old system I need access to.