Proper way to back up Linux for an upgrade with git, npm, and gem??

[fuzzybabybunny]

I want to upgrade from Elementary OS Luna to Freya. There's isn't an in-place upgrade option so I need to do a fresh install.

So I need to back up my /home directory. I've got all of my programming projects in there including git commits, rails, meteor, npm, etc.

Is it as simple as putting all of /home into a tar file, formatting the disk, installing Freya, and untarring everything back into its original place? I'm not sure how things like node packages or gem installer installs things into a system.

 

[Essence_of_War]

Should be fine, this is a decent reference for some general best practices:

https://sethrobertson.github.io/GitBestPractices/#backups

If you have a ton of repos, or any truly enormous repos, it might be worth it to write a script to do git gc and git repack but it's probably way easier to just tar+gz/xz/lrzip up your home directory and un-tar it when you do the upgrade.