3.2. Attachment is the Cause of All Suffering
If you're averse to reinstalling your OS from scratch, get over it.
Trying to keep an existing installation running too long is a bad
idea for a variety of reasons.
-
All hardware fails eventually.
Therefore, you should always have your important
files backed up in another location and should always be prepared
to rebuild your setup on a new disk and restore from backup.
-
File systems more than a couple years old can suffer from
"bit rot", where the
disk is still functional, but some of the bits have faded to
the point of being uncertain. For this reason, it's a bad idea
to perform OS upgrade after OS upgrade. Instead, the disk should
be wiped clean at least once every few years and everything
reinstalled from scratch, to "freshen the bits".
-
Practice makes perfect. If you avoid doing fresh installs, you
will lack the skills needed when it becomes necessary and struggle
to recover from hardware failures. If, on the
other hand, you do fresh installs frequently, a disk or system
failure will not be a big deal to you. Replace the failed
hardware and be back in action in an hour or two in most cases.