Comment 9 for bug 876146

Just wanted to add, that linux is extremely flexible in alternatives that can be offered to the user for fall-back (more so than any other OS out there). Imagination can go wild here.

-The user wants a full snapshot of entire system? we have clonezilla and other tools (even for creating live-cds of user defaults).

-The user wants upgrade manager to create a temporary backup partition to revert back in case of problem? it can be done

-User wants the system to auto download and create a bootable usb or cd? yes it can! and unetbootin is also an option

-User wants a restore partition (like what OEMs do with windows), it can be done.

-the 1 click "no questions asked" upgrade button, can even become an upgrade survey/wizard, determine your level of technical experience and offer alternatives based on that: Are you a technical user with other fall back OSs? great break away! ; Are you a granny with no prior technical experience? sorry upgrade denied, but use these methods instead to try a new release!

We have not offer new users more alternatives, not because it cant be done or they don't exist, but because we havent taken a few hours to think and discuss the situation, nor we have gathered the feedback.

Instead we offer the only alternative that is known to cause potential problems: a risky direct upgrade on the user's primary OS.

Today, the operation is supposedly offered for "convenience". But when the user faces critical issues, is far from being convenient anymore and turns into a mistake he wishes to revert back.

This was a popular legacy operation that had to be used due to serious limitations of disk space and internet bandwidth.

The OS use to take 50% of the hard drive, but now with HDDs reaching 1TB mark, they only take a very small % of the free space and even users with smaller drives have plenty of space for backups and other external medias. We dont have as many limitations as before.

Hopefully this topic will also see some light at the UDS. This is a "Precise" timing :)

>So it might be that the success rate is staying constant or even improving, while the number of failures reported on the forums still increases.

@Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)

Yea that could be the case too, but the only way to measure that would be to add the feature into "Apport" (or other tool) and send the feedback to either launchpad or another dedicated websites.

Still the bad upgrade cases still Exists (they are not made up), and even if its just 1% of our current base suffer any kind of bad upgrade, from medium to severe (1% of 12m, thats equal to 120,000 bad cases; imagine if we reach anything near the proposed 200 million...)

So providing in the meantime some fall backs for non tech users will avoid quite a few headaches and downtime.

Thanks!