You need to uninstall the old version before installing the new version. Otherwise you end up with mixed directory contents from the two versions.

You could probably delete the entire directory and then reinstall the more recent version, but that might leave things behind in the registry.

One possible approach (untested) is to (1) uninstall 5.40, (2) reinstall 5.32 to hopefully get back to where you were, (3) uninstall 5.32 to clean it out, and then (4) reinstall 5.40.

Neither approach will bring back your old modules but it's safer to reinstall them anyway. Or just stick with the portable version which is what I do.

If you want to work with several perl versions and switch between them as needed then berrybrew, maintained by stevieb, is well worth looking at.

swl contributed:

One possible approach (untested) is to (1) uninstall 5.40, (2) reinstall 5.32 to hopefully get back to where you were, (3) uninstall 5.32 to clean it out, and then (4) reinstall 5.40.

Yes, thanks, that's helpful. Just now I uninstalled 5.40 and reinstalled 5.32, which I briefly tested and which seems to be functional. I had managed to forget that MSI packaging includes the capability to uninstall the software (I'm still relearning stuff I once knew long ago).

Furthermore:

If you want to work with several perl versions and switch between them as needed then berrybrew, maintained by stevieb, is well worth looking at.

I am going to take a look at berrybrew, which I have heard of, and see if that's the preferred way for me to get a perl5.40 or other versions on my system (in addition to the one I already have on the USB drive).

… ok, I set up berrybrew, it's a little rough around the edges at least if you use git to fetch it: when I followed the directions to configure it I got bin/berrybrew.exe:Permission denied. No big deal, I just needed to chmod 0755 in cygwin. Then it said I had to be an Administrator to run it, so I started a PS/CMD shell as Admin and then it worked. I've got "berrybrew --help" open in my shell now ;-)

Jun 10, 2025 at 19:03 UTC

It's best to use the Windows installer to install berrybrew. It allows for seamless upgrades, and provides the facility to install its own UI.

An advantage of the MSI version is that it is on the %PATH% after installation, without any portableshell.bat invocation. I have several versions of portable Strawberry (including the awesome PDL-enabled distribution), but when I run other programs which start Perl it is good to have a fallback which is "always there".

Concrete example: I often start Emacs before running any shell. In Emacs, I can read nicely rendered POD, but that needs perl and pod2html on the path.

An advantage of the MSI version is that it is on the %PATH% after installation, without any portableshell.bat invocation.

Fair enough - but if I wanted to have a Strawberry perl that was "on the %PATH% after installation", I would add a portable Strawberry Perl permanently to the path, and stay clear of the MSI.
I really don't ever want to be encumbered with the MSI version(s) at all.

Cheers,
Rob

I did something bad. I configured the MSI installer to unpack Strawberry over my existing Strawberry installation.

Deja vu: Strawberry Perl, from 5.18 to 5.22

That leaves one question: If your Strawberry installation has some value for you, why don't you have a backup? And what about the other data on your computer? Do you care about it?

Getting your data backed up is not that hard. I currently use UrBackup (free and open source) for Windows machines, it comes with an ISO image for bare metal recovery (from images), but also does file backups. It runs on a Linux machine with sufficient disk space, and only needs a small agent running on the Windows machines.

For unix machines, I use a script running rsync that creates incremental, hardlinked backups. It started as a script downloaded from somewhere on the WWW, but I have rewritten it several times to match my changing needs. Still, it basically does what that old script did:

1. Mount the backup disk: mount /dev/some-disk /backup
2. Create a hardlink copy of the previous backup: cp -al /backup/day-1 /backup/day-0
3. Update the copy to the current state, i.e. create a backup: rsync -axHAXS --delete --numeric-ids /source /backup/day-0
4. Rotate the backups, deleting the oldest one first:
   1. rm -rf /backup/day-3
   2. mv /backup/day-2 /backup/day-3
   3. mv /backup/day-1 /backup/day-2
   4. mv /backup/day-0 /backup/day-1
5. Unmount the backup disk: umount /backup

That also works nicely and safely via ssh, so you can create a backup on a remote disk or RAID. Better yet, if you run a bunch of Unix machines and a backup server, you don't need anything but ssh and rsync installed on the Unix machines, the backup server can do the backup by tunneling rsync via ssh. We use exactly that setup at work.

Alexander

Deja vu: Strawberry Perl, from 5.18 to 5.22

That leaves one question: [backup]

Actually, two questions:

Why does the strawberry MSI installer allow to overwrite an existing installation?

I'm too lazy to set up a test environment, but I would at least expect a big fat warning when doing so. If not, that's a bug in the installer. If there is a warning, well, it is not big enough for at least two users.

The release notes for the current release don't contain a warning. Also, no warnings on the homepage or the support page. And no open issue requesting a warning on the issues page.

Alexander

--
Today I will gladly share my knowledge and experience, for there are no sweeter words than "I told you so". ;-)

Alexander said:

Why does the strawberry MSI installer allow to overwrite an existing installation? I'm too lazy to set up a test environment, but I would at least expect a big fat warning when doing so. If not, that's a bug in the installer (emphasis mine). If there is a warning, well, it is not big enough for at least two users. The release notes for the current release don't contain a warning. Also, no warnings on the homepage or the support page. And no open issue requesting a warning on the issues page.

I am in vehement agreement with Alexander, as you'd expect. I guess it's just a limitation in the MSI internals that it doesn't detect an existing installation of Strawberry where we are about to install, but somewhere in the web site for Strawberry there should be A WARNING IN CAPS., and I did look at the support page.

As an aside, I am using berrybrew to manage multiple StrawberryPerl installations now. It's a little weird (overnight my $PATH lost the element pointing to the Strawberry I was using {I swear}). Setting the $PATH requires Admin privileges and that a bit of an inconvenience. But I am repeating what I posted about in another node in this thread, sorry. Anyway, live and learn.

  Soren

Jun 13, 2025 at 17:08 UTC

And no open issue requesting a warning on the issues page.

Perhaps someone (who cares) might open such an issue ?

Cheers,
Rob

Good Monk afoken offered the following words:

That leaves one question: If your Strawberry installation has some value for you, why don't you have a backup? And what about the other data on your computer? Do you care about it?

Well. I'm going to give this some serious thought. I haven't been in the habit of making backups because it just seemed too troublesome to decide what to back up and how to do it, I suppose. The only form of backup I have been using is the Google Drive service, which has got some good stuff from years past and I'm glad to have it.

I appreciate the detail you provided about how you do backups, it was very clear.

never

I haven't been in the habit of making backups because it just seemed too troublesome to decide what to back up and how to do it, I suppose.

The "how" is easily solved if you have an old (or new) Linux box somewhere. (Urbackup server also runs on other Unixes, and on Windows, but I use it only on Linux servers.) Urbackup does not need a lot of hardware. I run it in a Proxmox container at home, with just 2 GBytes memory, 1 GByte swap, and two CPU cores (2.2 GHz each). At work, it runs on an old HP N36L (2x 1,3 GHz, 8 GByte RAM), together with the rsync backup script for the Linux machines. Backup is done on spinning rust, some single-digit TByte desktop harddisks in a RAID-1 or RAID-5. Just don't buy SMR disks, they suck big time. CMR is fine. SSDs, a fast CPU, and much RAM all don't hurt, but aren't really needed. Urbackup is limited by the available network bandwidth, and it is designed to run in background.

The "what" is almost as easy. Because at least pre-UEFI PCs need a master boot record and a boot sector, you want an image backup of your bootdisk. You don't need to have it created very often, because MBR and boot sector are usually constant. And you only need two or three images. It's just to start a bare metal restauration, if things have gone really wrong. The real backup are all files on all non-removable disks in your computer, with the exception of the swap file and the hibernation file. Urbackup will create a few full backups and a lot of incremental backups, and it will automatically clean up old backups. You want to keep incremental backups of at least a few weeks, and full backups for a few months. The full backups takes some time (because they are done in background), but the incremental backups are reasonably fast.

You can tell the Urbackup client to suspend the running backup if you need the full performance of your computer. I do that occasionally when juggling with huge VMs, or when the Urbackup clients tries to backup the files that I currently use.

I have configured Urbackup at home to create an incremental file backup every 24 hours, and a full file backup every 30 days, keeping max. 100 incremental and max. 10 full backups. Incremental image backups run every week, full image backups are disabled, up to 30 incremental and 5 full image backups are kept.

That sounds like a lot of data, but Urbackup deduplicates the data on disk. My boot disk is 240 GByte, and needs about 320 GByte of backup space for images. Together with the 500 GByte data disk (which is almost full), this fills about 1.5 TByte of backup space for images. Included in the file image backup are several large VMs that modify their hard disk images almost daily, so I guess that my file backup is unusually large. (The VM disk images can't be deduplicated.)

Alexander

--
Today I will gladly share my knowledge and experience, for there are no sweeter words than "I told you so". ;-)

Hi there!

I don't have experience on Windows, but in macOS I've been using Perlbrew for some time now, which deals exactly with these types of problems. I Did a quick search and there is at least one project to make Perlbrew work in Windows: https://github.com/stevieb9/berrybrew
There are probably more or others can comment on Perlbrew and Windows.

PerlBrew site: https://perlbrew.pl

yes there is berrybrew by our dear brother stevieb

L*

There are no rules, there are no thumbs..
Reinvent the wheel, then learn The Wheel; may be one day you reinvent one of THE WHEELS.