Safety precautions before running Yum Update

[mike2010]

I was told by my techies that I should run Yum Update atleast once a week.

Does this sound legit ?

It seems like the libraries and other little things get updated almost daily.

The firmware-header stuff as well.

Are there any recommended precautions to do before running a Yum Update ? I feel like once of these days..i'm gonna run it and the whole server is gonna go kaput. And I wont have an idea what went wrong... since most Yum Updates update multiple things at once.

And you cant really back the server up beforehand...because those updates usually write all over the place.

Is it just me ? I tend to put the updates off later than is recommended.. usually once a month or later.

any help easing my mind is much appreciated

 

[atomicturtle]

I run it every day, and in some cases automatically via cron. If you're concerned about rolling back to older versions, check out the plugin: yum-allowdowngrade

yum install yum-allowdowngrade

You can use this to roll back to previous implementations with yum. Or you can use the internal rollback feature (note: this can use a lot of space) by adding tsflags=repackage to /etc/yum.conf. This will store old versions of packages on the system

 

[mike2010]

with that being said, I guess its pretty rare then for something to go bad during a Yum Update ?