install/upgrade question

[Alphons "Fonz" van Werven]

Tsu-Fan Cheng wrote:

> Can I only change/overwrite the /etc
> /usr, etc but leave /home intact??

Depends. If your /home is a seperate partition AND you don't need to
repartition (relabel) the disk, you should be ok. In disklabel, you'll find
a newfs toggle. If you set this to N for a certain partition, that partition
will not be reformatted and all data on it should be preserved if nothing 
strange happens. I've done this several times without problems, for example
to preserve /home and/or my CVS repository between installs. I always kept
backups though, in case something goes wrong during the install and the
partition gets screwed up after all, which is unlikely but NOT impossible!

If your /home is merely a directory on a larger partition (for example
because it's symlinked to /usr/home or something), or if you need to
repartition/relabel the disk, it gets tricky and you'll probably be better
off restoring from a backup.

Alphons

-- 
All right, that does it Bill [Donahue]. I'm pretty sure that killing Jesus
is not very Christian.
                              -- pope Benedict XVI, South Park episode #158