I’m lost and way behind on updates

I have been cutting hundreds (200-500) of knife blanks every month since I first installed and got plasmaC up and running. I have put off updating it because I could not afford to mess something up and be down because we are normally 3-4 weeks back logged as it is on orders. But I just looked at what has been updated and noticed I have been dealing with bugs and frustration that I could of avoided if I just kept current. My issue is my plasmaC is very vintage as I installed everything and started running in May of 2019. I have been out of the loop since then and I think I forgot everything I learned about Linux and installing/updating. Can I just update my system or do I have to start over from scratch. I have thought about getting a second hard drive and starting over and keeping the original HD as an emergency back up in case things go wrong. My system is a little messed up anyways as I had installed it wrong the first time and had to reinstall it so I have it on twice. So I would not mind starting over from scratch but I don’t know what I would need to copy over to the new HD so I don’t have to go back through all the machine set up. Thanks guys for any help you can provide. I looked at the manual and instantly felt super lost lol.

A second hard drive would be a good idea. PlasmaC is now included in the LinuxCNC ISO. So installing it from scratch should be pretty easy.

I redid mine from scratch recently. I just ran pncconf to create a config that had some movement and then just copied and pasted from my old config. Then I ran the plasmac installer. I would probably go with a new hdd and install from the Linuxcnc iso first.

well I thought I got it all switched over correctly but something is wrong. I blasted through the pncconf to set up the files. then looked at my old ini and hal files and made the changes to the new files. But like I said something is wrong and I'm guessing its because I transferred something over that's not longer supported. here are my new files that I'm trying to get to work. in the next post I will post my old files from my working set up. it said something about a spindle var not found so i removed that from the file and retried but then it gave me another error. I also will attach both error reports. thank you

H ere are the working files from my running machine

Facepalm
The reason there are 2 error files is when it gave me the spindle error I removed the spindle and retried and it game me the network error. My board is set to 10.10.10.10 and it’s correct in the files but I completely forgot to set it to that using a terminal. So that would explain my network issue. Thanks guys

So I made the changes to my network file and still nothing. Network stuff really gets me confused. I looked at what the file said on my working HDD and just did the new one the same.