I'm running 12.04 and want to upgrade to the latest stable version. How do I do that without losing my data files?
1 Answer
If I'm correct, there is no way to upgrade from 12.04 to 13.10 directly unless you reinstall Ubuntu completely, which will lead to a loss of data.
My advice is, backup your important files - this is important. Whether or not your files are supposed to be deleted does not matter - accidents can and will happen.
After backing up, you can upgrade from 12.04 to 12.10, then to 13.04, then to 13.10 by running
do-release-upgrade
in a terminal.
However, this is extremely slow as you will be upgrading 3 times. My recommendation is, copy your files to another device (perhaps using the 13.10 Live CD) and reinstall your Ubuntu.
Summary: Two choices.
- Backup files and upgrade 3 times using
do-release-upgrade
, or - Reinstall Ubuntu 13.10 after copying files elsewhere.