How Do I Upgrade From 8 To 9?

The installer didn't create a separate partition for /home so what is the recommended process for upgrading from 8 to 9 without losing all my data?
Is it possible to do a dist upgrade from 8 to 9?

Hi opticyclic, Wolfman wrote a guide on how to upgrade from one version to another in his excellent Post Install Guide here:

viewtopic.php?f=4&t=2054

Personally I prefer to attach external drive (if you have one), go to '/home', press 'Ctrl+ H' to show all folders and files then copy the lot to a created folder on external drive:

The relevant link within his guide is viewtopic.php?f=6&t=4848

I also took a look at this disk space requirements
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DiskSpace

On a 500GB disk, does 20GB for root and the rest for home sound reasonable?

Separate home and root partitions will make it easier to upgrade in future.
Now I think about it, I'm surprised that this isn't the default action in the installer.

Hi opticyclic, apologies for the delay, on holiday with a rubbish internet connection! I usually opt for:

Primary: 30 Gb, ext4, marked as '/'
Extended Partition: Create swap area at END first of 4 GB
Then everything in front of it as '/home' formatted to ext4

ext4 is for SATA drives and PATA drives - SSD have to be 'trimmed' and formatted to ext2.

The difficulty of presetting layouts as you suggested may not suit all people. For example, PCLinuxOS 2007 auto prepared a /home partition of only 10 Gb! I always think you are better performing the 'something else' method for stability and ease of backup.

See Part A of my dual boot with Windows 7 on veoh.com - link is in the Global Announcements.