Arch Linux

miomio

Member

Registered: 2016-01-17

Posts: 167

Nervous when updating system.

Can someone allay my concerns or tell me a more Arch way of performing my system updates. I get that Arch is a rolling update distro, but bad habits being what they are I sometimes I leave updates for weeks and end up having to install lots of packages. There's a number of them that always make my sphincter twinge; anything related to:

mkinitcpio
kernel/linux
binutils
cryptsetup
device-mapper
anything efi related
gcc related
harfbuzz related
icu
intel-media-driver
systemd related

I'm OK with updating other software, but these always worry me. The reason is I am still yet to learn how they all relate to each other and how issues could cascade from them. I use dm-crypt+LUKS for FDE and I fear rebooting only to find the disk won't unlock or isn't found, since I have no backups of important data.

A recovery file somewhere for cryptsetup aside, how do I mitigate such a scenario, or isn't the above likely to occur through updating packages alone?

jasonwryan

Anarchist

From: .nz

Registered: 2009-05-09

Posts: 30,426

Website

Re: Nervous when updating system.

1. Back up your data.

2. Back up your data.

3. Get used to booting from a live media and chrooting into your system to perform recovery/debugging tasks.

4. Relax. If you are doing 1 and 2, nothing bad can really happen.

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Registered Linux User #482438

ewaller

Administrator

From: Pasadena, CA

Registered: 2009-07-13

Posts: 20,703

Re: Nervous when updating system.

I have never had any problem doing regular updates any time in the last decade; with the exception of the one or two times where an announcement was made warning that manual intervention was required. 

Our moderator notes do indicate you have a history of attempting partial updates.  *That* is a sure fire way to break things.  That you enumerate a dozen or so things you worry about updating, I've a hunch you may still gravitate towards that bad habit.  Of that list, you can safely (for a while) ignore EFI and kernel stuff.

Last edited by ewaller (2019-11-20 23:29:46)

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2ManyDogs

Forum Fellow

Registered: 2012-01-15

Posts: 4,648

Re: Nervous when updating system.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Sy … the_system

kokoko3k

Member

Registered: 2008-11-14

Posts: 2,473

Re: Nervous when updating system.

Our moderator notes

I'm sure reading them would be a lot of fun!
(write that i'm sorry for this OT in your notes as well!)

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