In the UPGRADE-TXT,they say :

'Before you begin, I would strongly recommend making a backup of your
system, or, if not the entire system, at least the /etc directory.'

What is the easiest way to make a backup of the whole system ?

NjB

you can just .tar.gz the whole system I would guess
probably simpler than using dd

However; being that your upgrading from 13.1 to current
you may not need too

just install new slackpkg first; then edit new /etc/slackpkg/mirrors
then do

slackpkg update && slackpkg upgrade-all && slackpkg install-new

Wouldn't the latest version of slackpkg be installed if you "slackpkg update && slackpkg upgrade-all && slackpkg install-new" from the 13.1 repo before switching to -Current (would "upgradepkg slackpkg" work)? I thought the intention of slackpkg was to keep your software in sync with the official repos, so it seems ironic that it wouldn't keep itself in sync. Forgive my ignorance, as it says under my name, I'm a Slack-n00b.

Surley its easy to use something like clonezilla as found on the Parted Magic live CD, or if you want to know what I use sometimes on XP,I prefer the old Paragon 6 which I think is still free...

1 members found this post helpful.

Not sure what other's would claim to be the easiest. Here's a nice guide Link. When I need to make a disaster recovery backup, I boot from the Slackware DVD, mount the hard drive in read only mode, mount our file server's nfs share. Then tar/gzip the contents to the file server.

Clonezilla is an easy tool to create a complete backup. I've used it many times to create bootable restore DVDs.

There's more methods and applications to backup your system then that are days in a year.

It hasn't in the past. There is no automatic or predefined upgrade order that slackpkg does. Though it would be nice if slackpkg would process the changelog, and if certain package updates are found (pkgtools, tar, xz, findutils, slackpkg ...) sort the list and upgrade those first.

It's stuck in my head to always upgrade those special packages manually in order first - then do the install-new upgrade-all. I pretty sure the order is defined in UPGRADE.TXT with an explanation as to why that order is necessary.

OK, well I'll definitely take special care to look out for it next time I read UPGRADE.TXT - this is the sort of thing that could have caused me serious problems if I'd remained ignorant. Cheers for the heads-up.

A backup is always a good idea.
Backup should be your second nature when changing files, or doing upgrades.

I think many people have the wrong idea of what backups are, how to do them, and how often to do them. In this case the OP asked what backup to do before a system upgrade. But what if his disk crashed - he would lose everything not backed up. The trick here is to decide what's important to you. Don't backup the system executables - those can be rebuilt from an install disk. Forget the system logs - you don't need them. What you want is any special configuration changes you made (that's usually the /etc dir, maybe one or two others like /boot). Then there's your personal stuff - mail, documents, bookmarks, multimedia (movies/music) - these must be backed up. But not just for an upgrade ! Assume that you could lose your system at any time - theft, crash, etc. You should copy your important stuff to another separate disk (usb, esata, network). Don't trust your data to you home server only - what if your entire house burned down or you were burgled and both your laptop and server was stolen. Disks are cheap - keep multiple versions of your data over several devices (rsync to usb is fantastically fast) - and then ask a friend to keep the disk at his house. Perhaps keep his backup at your house. As for how often - simple - how much are you prepared to lose !

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The /etc directory is very important of course.
But Recently I newly installed 13.1 with the ISO DVD then I upgraded using pointing the slackpkg mirrors to current then using
slackpkg update, install-new and upgrade-all.

Everything went all right except
I didn't mad a recent copy of my bookmarks in Firefox (*.json).
The same for the contacts (Address Book) in Thunderbird (*.ldif).

I was obliged to go to old files

The System (mainly config files)
The Datas (audios videos photos text documents ...)
But also the Contacts and Bookmarks

Three Categories so may be three backups

NjB