bryan-spamtrap3@darkforest.org (B. James Phillippe) wrote:

> I have a production Alpha box running 1.5.2 with 3rd-party packages from
> pkgsrc as well as some locally-installed applications.  I would like to
> upgrade to 1.5.3, but I don't want to lose my /etc, /usr/home, or other
> vital directories.

If your harddisks are not very huge I'd just do a dd because it's the
least complicated method and everything will be saved/restored bit by bit.
You can then boot from a install cd/disk and restore everything with dd.
Of course, you should verify the cds (or tapes or whatever) have
successfully saved everything. You might want to pipe everything through
bzip2 although an (sector) error will be rather fatal in this case.

-- 
Michael