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By dacroz on
Is there still an upgrade path from 4.6.3 to current? I've read the upgrade instructions, which say to go to 4.6.5, then to the next one, etc. Are those intermediate versions still available for download? Or is there a more straightforward way to jump all the way to current from something that old.
I've put off upgrading for far too long, but don't want to lose the content accumulated during that time
Comments
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I would not jump from 4.6.3 to 5.x or 6.x. I'd export my database into a test site and start working with upgrading the test site to see what problems you run into.
all versions of drupal are available by going to the project page and clicking on view more releases.
DO NOT ignore making backups and you are in fairly unchartered territory especially if you are using contributed modules that are as old as your version of core.
Yes for core, uncertain for contrib modules/themes
The safest way is to upgrade core to the last 4.6.x release (just in case there were some schema changes), then upgrade core to the last 4.7.x release, then upgrade core to the latest 5.x release, then upgrade to the latest 6.x release.
If those releases are no longer listed as downloads, you'll need to check them out of CVS.
It'll will be a bit tedious, but it should work fine. Don't skip the backups each step though, and practice each step on a test site first.
Where you probably will run into trouble is contrib modules depending on what they are and how many you have. I'd guess that a fair chunk of your contrib modules don't have an upgrade path for all those versions.
For each module you'll need to look for a supported upgrade path, a supported migration path, or failing that decide whether you'll just drop its data/settings or manually migrate its data/settings to a new Drupal 6 replacement module.
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Anton
same boat...
I'm in the same boat with an old drupal site i've never bothered to really upgrade as it's been idle on a home machine for awhile.
I've signed up for a nice little VPS and plan to use it as a personal test bed / host for my upgraded drupal. I've dumped the DB and I'll try the upgrade path mentioned...
*crossing fingers*
status update...
I updated my "cloned" site and seem to have it working
ITEM ---> OLD ---> NEW
OS > RedHat9 > Ubuntu8
Apache > 2.0.40 > 2.2.8
PHP > 4.2.2 > 5.2.4
MySQL > 3.23 > 5.0
Drupal > 4.6.3 > 6.6
There was alot of moving parts as you can see. I don't use any modules really except for the "image" module (see below)
I did roughly the following...
1) backed up my entire site and moved it to my new system.
2) restored the database and files
NOTE: Site didn't work, thinks' that's cause of the PHP version
3) did the Drupal 4.7 upgrade
4) stepped through the 5.0, 5.1, etc. to 5.12 (i'm sure you can skip a bunch, but i'm paranoid)
5) did the 6.0 upgrade
6) did the 6.6 upgrade
Everything seemed to work after that. I did see errors in the upgrade script about locks, but that's cause I assume the scripts were written for the old version for MySql4.
Only thing that was really broke was the images on my site. I downloaded the latest "image" module and installed it. Tested it with a new image. Then I just went through the backend and updated the SQL tables (image table if I recall). That got all my images working but none of the "galleries". So then I did some queries and created a script to insert the rows in the term_node table. So far so good but I'm still testing.
Hehe, now you've got 6.7 to do :)
Just for anyone else reading, yeah most of those intermediate steps weren't necessary. eg 5.12 contains all the previous DB upgrade scripts that 5.0 - 5.11 had, and 6.6 had all the stuff 6.0 - 6.5 had.
So you could just go -> 4.7.11 -> 5.12 -> 6.6 (although currently it would be 5.13 and 6.7, but you get the idea).
I'm not sure how you handled the image module, but it would've been safest to upgrade it at each step along the way too.
Well done, nice result :)
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Anton
How did you get past "site didn't work" step?
I'm curious how you got from step 2 to 3, if the site didn't work. I tried the same thing, and, because it didn't work, couldn't log in.