Yeah, there aren't any critical security vulnerabilities (although there does seem to be a
minor crash vulnerability in 0.18), but if you're getting disk errors or whatever, I'd advise you to at the very least back up your wallet, and perhaps try to find out what's going wrong..
If you don't, you might run into a situation where your disk becomes corrupted or whatever. Of course, I don't exactly know your situation, but "disk errors" don't look like a healthy sign to me.
(If it's just a permission error, the solution might be trivial.)
thanks for your response - I tried to update via Snap, i have very limited linux experience - this installed but then got the disk permissions errors when trying to run 0.20.1 ..... so I have gone back to 0.18
maybe both versions are conflicting or something
I tried to download a tar file from bitcoin.org, it has files inside but no real guide as to how to install
as long as I am not hindering the network I will leave it on 0.18 until such time as I can figure out how to install a new version, I don't keep any bitcoin in the wallet - thank you