EH-Net

Just currently upgrading one of my BackTrack 5 installs to R3 and was wondering whether or not people preferred a clean install as opposed to an upgrade? Would be interested to hear what people prefer and their rationale for either choice.

BT upgrades can be tedious at best, nightmarish otherwise.  I have not had any upgrades go particularly well until some time after launch.  Let others set the bugs worked out.  I typically run BT in a VM of some sort, so I typically set up a second drive for data and can then attach it to whichever other distro I need.  I always keep the old versions around, but it seems best to do a clean install in my experience.

I prefer a clean install. I use it on a VM, and all my customizations are stored in a repository in my local network, and I can quickly git clone them over to the new install. I have scripts that copy old configurations over and setup everything the way I like it. This allows me to quickly get it up to speed with minimal interaction in a matter of minutes.

I also run Backtrack in a VM. That being said I've always done upgrades. I
can't say that I've run into any issues during while doing an upgrade
. I've always been perfectly able to hose a Backtrack install all by myself.

My upgrade to R3 was painless and BackTrack already has a nice HowTo:

http://www.backtrack-linux.org/backtrack/upgrade-from-backtrack-5-r2-to-backtrack-5-r3/ (http://www.backtrack-linux.org/backtrack/upgrade-from-backtrack-5-r2-to-backtrack-5-r3/)