[Ubuntu-US-CA] Least painful way to upgrade 12.10?

[Josh Berkus]

All,

So I have a Zenbook Prime running 12.10, which is EOL.  I understand I'm
going to have to step it through upgrades to 13.04 and 13.10 to get it
to 14.04.

Questions:

a) is there a "least painful" way to do this?

b) is there a good way to back up my entire HDD image so that I can
revert to 12.10 if things go south?

-- 
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
http://pgexperts.com