Hey everyone!  
I have OPNsense running bare metal on an N100 mini pc. Updating it from 25.1.12 to 25.7. first looked fine, but after restarting resulted in a boot loop for me. The thing is, i have a so called smart home, which is not so smart after all when the network goes down, so i had to resolve it asap.  
  
The output said:

>panic: softdep\_setup\_inomapdep: depndency 0xfffff80004cc7180 for newinode already exists

I had a backup of my `config.xml`, so after a few failed attempts to fix the running system, i decided to do a clean install of 25.7. using my backup with the configuration importer. At first it seemed it worked, but when i downloaded the missing plugins, the issue reappeared. You can see the plugins i am using in the picture. I don't remember which plugin i installed first (as it was also quite late already).

It was getting late already, so i decided to do a clean install of 25.1.12 using the configuration importer. I  had to manually redownload the plugins (i somehow thought OPNsense would download them automatically if present in the `config.xml`) and adjust a value here and there, but now everything works as before essentially. Oh boy!  


This leaves me with two questions, that i hope the community can help me with:  
  
1) How to go on from here? Obviously i want to update at some point. How can i make sure that i don't run into the same issue again? What i want to try is to set up OPNSense with my backup on a virtual machine as a test, but i feel it is not really the same.

2) How to prevent such situations in the future? Do i really need to have a failover system or is there a more cost effective solution?

Thanks all for the input and discussion to follow. I appreciate it!

Investigation after 25.7 update disaster