I have done upgrade in place (no new harddrive unless we needed a larger capacity drive) on several unix/bsd derivatives. Your file system comments are very well taken. However, using "stock" Ubuntu LTS for the OS and file system, is your experience contrary to those of others? On 5/26/20 7:21 PM, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote: > On Tue, May 26, 2020 at 3:54 PM Troy Dawson <[log in to unmask]> wrote: >> Although in the past the official policy of Red Hat was that you needed to do a fresh install going from EL N to N+1, that is starting to change. >> There is an internal team called "LEAP" whose job it is to make sure you can do that. >> I believe RHEL 7.8 to RHEL 8.1 was the first that you could officially do that. >> I don't know all the details. all I know is "we're working on it." >> I'm pretty sure that at the current time we aren't as smooth as Debian, they've been doing it much longer. >> But we're getting better, and for RHEL9, LEAP is being involved from the start. >> So maybe in a few releases / years people will be able to say our updates are as good, or even easier than debians. > Been there, done that. It works great until it doesn't. While updating > the RPM's may be feasible, there have been subtle changes in > filesystems which man starting with an old filesystem is prone to > errors, and upgrading in place is.... not a reliable process. *All* > operating systems are prone to such issues, unless you can basically > mount the old file system as an image and apply the updates from > outside. I've done upgrades with approximately 20,000 Red Hat based > systems, over my career, and others. If you were foolish enough to use > ReiserFS, for example, you'll *really* need to rebuld your filesystems > in between OS upgrades..