Advice on upgrade from stable to testing?

[Daan]

Hi,

I want to upgrade my Debian from lenny (stable) to squeeze (testing), I would like some advice.

It is rather important that I don't end up with a non-functioning installation, even if its just for a short time, because it's my work computer and my boss wouldn't take a Debian upgrade as an excuse for not having a computer. He prefers Windows anyway, and that's the only OS the ICT department supports.

So, here are my file systems:

# df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda8              40G  9.3G   29G  25% /
tmpfs                 1.8G     0  1.8G   0% /lib/init/rw
udev                   10M  856K  9.2M   9% /dev
tmpfs                 1.8G     0  1.8G   0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda6              50G  7.1G   41G  16% /home
/dev/sda7              50G   47G  191M 100% /mnt/data
//cldata1/daang       4.0G  2.7G  1.4G  66% /mnt/cldata1/daang

I would like to dual boot between lenny and squeeze, so that I can always fall back to lenny if squeeze didn't work out for some reason. I would keep my /home and share it between the two.

I would do the following:

1. Boot my system with a Linux live CD.
2. Make an image of my root partition with partimage as backup.
3. Resize the root partition to make space for the root partition of squeeze.
4. • Create the root partition, format it as ext3, and copy everything from the lenny root fs to the new squeeze root fs, OR
   • Use the image created in step 2 in stead.
5. Edit the /boot/grub/menu.lst to make an entry for the new (soon-to-be-upgraded-to-squeeze) Debian.
6. Reboot. Since I now should have to identical lennies, I can choose which I will use for the upgrade.
7. In lenny perform the upgrade to squeeze. I have yet to find out how to exactly do that.

Is this to much work for a little safety?

An additional advantage is that once squeeze is running fine, I have an additional partition I can use for other OS's at some later time, like Debian 64 bit.

Is it wise to share my /home between lenny and squeeze? Or should a duplicate that too?

What do you think of my strategy in general?

[jledhead]

that is definitely a cautious approach. Why don't you just back everything up to a remote server and then upgrade, if it foobars you can just rollback? That would be the easiest IMO and there is very little actual downtime involved if you use something like this:
Virtualize a Server with Minimal Downtime

that article is for going P2V but the concept is the same and it works like a champ.

if you are wanting to be able to boot off both, I can't comment on sharing the home dir since I have never done it.

[etech3]

one way to do a backup is to use mondo. I like mondo because it will your backup into cds that you can load and run a restore.