Do you mean upgrades between major versions of your distribution? Updating packages has (practically) never broken things for me, and I use Debian Testing. Befo

Do you mean upgrades between major versions of your distribution? Updating packages has (practically) never broken things for me, and I use Debian Testing. Before I started using a rolling release distribution, I found it easier to keep the system and my data separated on disk and just install a new distribution afresh whenever I want to install a new version.