Topic: upgrade or reinstall and hard drives

[Indira]

Hi,
I have SME 5.1 and it's not working properly, due to several improper shutdows in the last months (electricity problems at home).
When I start the server, it takes about 10 minutes to boot and start all the services, when it used to take 1 minute or less.(300 mhz, PII, 128K RAM)
It also has a problem, when it tries to start httpd admin, it says OK FAILED.
I think I should reinstall, but I am not sure which version to use.
So, here, my questions:
1) Should I install 5.6?
2) Do the back up to desktop from a 5.1 work in 5.6?
3) Will I have to configure everything again?
4) WIll Awstats go on working or will I loose the old logs?
   (I once tried making them work again and they just started from scratch, so I lost two monts stats)
5) Is there a way to clean the hard drive, or something I can do to free up space? (like when you clean temp files in windows?)
6) the old logs (not from awstats but from SME) can I delete them? if so, where are they?
 thanks a lot for your help
Indira

[Andrew Rosenau]

Generally what I have seen in these forums as the recommended action is to backup all your data, and completly wipe out your drive and reinstall.--I'm not saying thats what you should do--thats just what I've seen as the recommended solution.

[Indira]

hi,
I finally decided to format, BUT, when I try to make a back up to desktop, it fails.
the whole buncho of files do not take more than 2 GB, so that's not the error.
It finishes downloading it, but when I check filesize, it's smaller (should be 90 MB and it's just 45) and also, I check integrity with the server application, and it's says it's not a complete back up.
So, again I'm stuck in the process.
I am manually downloading the sites, but don't know where the logs and stats are.
Also, I don't know what else to back up, I have some databases I would like to keep, but I can't find where they are stored, and the awstats, I don't know where they are kept, and what I should back up.
The main problem is the server is so slow now that everything times out, even in the local network.
Maybe there is something I am doing wrong?

Indira