In my patchy and incomplete experience this is true for Ubuntu but untrue for Debian. As long as I've followed the upgrade instructions I don't think I've ever

In my patchy and incomplete experience this is true for Ubuntu but untrue for Debian. As long as I've followed the upgrade instructions I don't think I've ever had a Debian stable version bump fail. Whereas Ubuntu... yeah, backup and restore, because you're going to do it anyway.