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I would like to upgrade my Ubuntu 18.04 installation to 20.04 in the near future. However, I have had bad experiences with system upgrades in the past, especially with Ubuntu, and are therefore reluctant towards an upgrade because I fear it might fail.

Is it possible to revert a failed upgrade to the state before the upgrade, e.g., using Timeshift? Or is Timeshift unable to recover if there is a failed installation of Ubuntu on the disk? How to make sure a rollback is possible?

Green绿色
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  • I suggest you first install a cloud storage provider like https://mega.nz/ which gives you 50 gigs of free cloud storage ... copy all valuable dirs + files onto the mirrored dir so you have an encrypted secure remote cloud backup of all goodies ... my experience with Ubuntu upgrades is they tend to go smooth ... maybe brush up on how to boot up into Recovery just in case you encounter a black screen post upgrade which is an admittedly rare event ... the further away from plain vanilla stock Ubuntu you currently are the more chances you take as in using Nvidia drivers .. just back up and doit – Scott Stensland Aug 21 '20 at 00:11
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    No software or hardware is 100% perfect 100% of the time and that's the reason backups are necessary. Have you considered backing up the whole installation? See: https://askubuntu.com/questions/7809/how-to-back-up-my-entire-system – Nmath Aug 21 '20 at 00:14
  • You don't say if you're talking about desktop or server, but I've had mostly good experiences with upgrades, and should a desktop upgrade have issues, and I conclude it's not easily fixed, I re-install with the release I'm heading for using something else, re-use existing partitions without format which causes my additional packages to be re-installed as part of new install, and none of my user files touched so settings remain anyway. Personally I consider that my backup upgrade (it doesn't stop me from having backups of my data too) – guiverc Aug 21 '20 at 00:35
  • Revering an upgrade is possible...IF you have been backing up all the GB of system files. However, many folks don't do that: A clean-install is generally faster and easier for most folks. Most users need only back up their data. – user535733 Aug 21 '20 at 00:54
  • Since I installed Ubuntu on this laptop, I do incremental backups of the systems from time to time using Timeshift. Before upgrade, I would backup my personal data onto my external hard disk. They are no problem to me. Re-installing the system would probably work nevertheless, but then, I have to also re-install and re-configure everything - which I'd like to avoid. So, the bottomline of all this is that I can rollback when I simply copy the disk byte-by-byte and copy it back using a live stick when it failed? – Green绿色 Aug 21 '20 at 09:16

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