YALU (Yes, another linux upgrade)

I can't get over how easy it is to upgrade a linux box.

I had been running an installation that I had upgraded from Ubuntu Dapper to Edgy, and
it somehow screwed up my video settings and was running kind of slow. I had some time off for Christmas, and thought I'd dedicate a minimum of that time to wiping everything out and installing Edgy from scratch.

So I started by copying all known data files to an external drive. There was something like 70GB, so that took a while. Then I installed Edgy from scratch, wiping everything out in the process. Then I copied the files back. While that process was running, I used apt-get to install everything I knew I needed/wanted.

It's done already. On a linux box, there's no registry. So, all your settings are stored in configuration files. In this case, they all got restored from the backup, so everything that I wiped out during the installation magically appeared again. My browsing history, settings, mail, cache, etc. all just came back from nowhere.

Except, of course, the stuff I had in my MySQL database. I forgot to back that up. I had one website I was working on for my church which is now empty of content. Not a big deal, since it was all test content anyway, but still. If I had remembered to do that, I'd be done. At least now I have something to keep me busy for a couple more days.