I am reprinting below a summary of exchanges on various lists on this subject. Many of us are/will be facing this challenge, and a pathway through it honed by the community would be great. If we come out with a good set of recommendations, then we should host it on the contribs wiki (thanks to Brian Read for the idea).
[Answers below are provided by Gordon Rowell].
Q: Updates from a lower versions are going to bring lots of challenges, like it or not.
A: They work cleanly for unmodified systems and systems with released updates. The
dev team has now done a huge number of upgrades from 6.x of various flavours
and quite a lot of upgrades of modified systems.
Q: How about recommending new installation of 7, and restore of user data via destop method?
A: That won't help with custom templates and some contribs still install custom templates.
Also, many people have too much data for desktop backups.
Q: This should work irrespective of whether contribs have been installed on the previous version?
A: No, but this would:
- Backup
- Install 7.0
- Restore
- Disable all custom templates:
cd /etc/e-smith
mv templates-custom templates-custom.old
mkdir templates-custom
mv templates-user-custom templates-user-custom.old
mkdir templates-user-custom
signal-event post-upgrade
signal-event reboot
Or this:
- Remove all packages which are not on the 6.0/6.0.1/6.5 CD
- Disable all custom templates:
cd /etc/e-smith
mv templates-custom templates-custom.old
mkdir templates-custom
mv templates-user-custom templates-user-custom.old
mkdir templates-user-custom
- Upgrade from CD
Carefully reinstall SME7 versions of the contribs, if they exist.
Comments by Steve Bush:Great info.....It'll come in handy when I roll out the SME7 upgrades.
I ran into this problem with a contrib that I missed uninstalling before my
first sme7 upgrade. I installed from scratch, restored from desktop and couldn't figure out that
there were hidden (.qmail) files in the templates-user-custom directory.
If there was a check box in the restore page "don't restore custom apps", it
would probably fix a lot of problems. Thanks again for the information.
Comment by Gordon Rowell:“Great info.....It'll come in handy when I roll out the SME7 upgrades.”
Raised in bug 812. The dev team are raising lots of things in the "SME Server Documentation" category in Bugzilla. We need some serious effort on the SME7 FAQ. I would really like to start again - much of the FAQ needs to be rewritten with SME7.
Volunteers - please contact docteam@lists.contribs.org
Comment by Charlie Brady:“ Also many people have too much data for desktop backups”
I'd go further and suggest that most people will have too much data for desktop backups.
Comments from Brian Read:My "home" server (6.0.1) has about 80Gb of data in ibays. My plan is to
build a new server on SME7, then "break" the raid mirror on the old
server, and move one of the hard discs to the new server. I will then
boot from the SME6 drive, and unlink the "files" directory from the ibay
(and link it somewhere else - perhaps under /opt or somewhere. Then
I'll do a desktop backup. Re-boot from the SME7 drive(s), and restore
the desktop backup. Then I'll copy the Ibay data from the old Hd (I'll
need to mount it). Et Voila!
Any better ideas or variations?
Q: Brian, I suspect that your desktop backup will not include any ibays. So you will have to re-create all ibays before restoring the data from your mounted drive, correct?
A: no, I am expecting the ibays structure to be part of the desktop backup, but with no data (I mean't the "files" dir under the ibay)
Comment from Gordon Rowell:Brian is correct.
Comment from Filippo Carletti:“Any better ideas or variations?”
Use the new restore from disk that Charlie recently added to e-smith-backup.
See here:
http://bugs.contribs.org/show_bug.cgi?id=615(Edited by Gordon Rowell to remove the "from desktop" part of the title)
(unsticky, is in the FAQ)