I added some information on some of the new stuff in the OpenBSD
disklabel(8) portion of the installation process on my page at:
There’s a link there, too, to a good write-up on preserving your disk layout:
Preserving an existing OpenBSD partition layout during a re-install
Also picked up on a good way today to rename multiple files using perl:
ls -1 | perl -nle’$o=$_; s/OLDPATTERN/NEWPATTERN/; $n=$_; rename($o,$n)if!-e$n’
Pretty nifty. You can rename any part of the file names.
Cheers
You’ve installed OpenBSD and run it for the last six months.
Now the new release is out and, although you’ve done a good
backup of everything including your home directory to a second
drive or tape, it’d still be much easier to not have to copy all
your data back to /home after the the new install. I asked on
the OpenBSD miscellaneous mailing list and was told after I was in
disklabel(8) and satisified with all my existing partitions, when it
came to the part where it asks for mount points for each partition,
not to assign one for the partitions I wished to keep intact. I entered
none to be safe for my /home and /data partitions, assigned the
proper mount points for the other partions /usr, /usr/local, /var, and
/tmp and then entered done. Naturally I was warned that continuing
would destroy all existing data and it did, but only on the partitions
which I had assigned mount points to. After the install when I rebooted,
I mounted /home and /data and there was all my data! So, that
saves some wear and tear on my old box and a lot of copying time. Last time
I looked I think I had somewhere around 6Gb of stuff in my 10Gb home
directory. I hope this saves other folks the unnecessary work I used to do
and will do no longer. 
20081209 Addendum
I added a page on the web site on this subject with some explanatory
images along with the text.
Cheers!
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