"One of the greatest advantages of debian over other linux distributions is that we can upgrade our systems live from one version to another (hopefully with minimal damage or impact to the running system), while other distros like rhel will not recommend their users to ever do this but to do a full new installation and migrate over their user data afterwards. Obviously it is a great advantage to be able to perform a live upgrade from one version to the other, and from my experience this has not caused problems, but even so, if this is a production server or just a system you care for and it is not for testing, I would start by making a backup of the system and be prepared in case it will no longer work after this. Just in case... Also you should start by reading the release notes of the new version and look for any incompatibilities (hardware or software) or changed things that could affect your particular setup."
