What to back up before upgrading?

[Johnny Rosenberg]

I am finally going to replace my very old Ubuntu 10.10 with the
somewhat newer Ubuntu 12.04 on my main laptop. I have /home on a
separate partition and I have an external backup of all my ”important”
stuff (most of the things kept in $HOME). Whan tryng toplan the whoel
thing I realised that there are some things I want to keep that's not
in $HOME, for example my Gedit snippets of the code snippets plugin,
and they seem to be located at /usr/share/gedit-2/plugins, so
obviously I need to backup that directory too (maybe the whole
/usr/share/ directory).

What more would I probably want to backup before I start installing
the new system?

I will install the Ubuntu 12.04 from scratch, but I'm going to keep my
/home partition, if nobody tells me that it would be a very bad idea.
If so, I will install the whole thing from scratch and then copy what
I need from my external backup later.

Any input appreciated (except flame-war stuff).


Kind regards

Johnny Rosenberg
ジョニー・ローゼンバーグ