Upgrading Modules best practice

[moorezilla]

I have a dumb question that I can't find the answer to in the forum.

Does upgrading modules put saved data at risk?

If I want to upgrade say, frontendusers, but I don't want to lose any of the people already signed up, what is the best way to upgrade? Is the module manager's "download and install" the way to go, or should I just overwrite the old module with the new one with the xml or zip routes? Do either of these protect the data?

Basically, I want to upgrade the module, but I want make sure upgrading will not hemmorhage the users and passwords already in the system.

Thanks,
am

[calguy1000]

answer, every time you upgrade anything, you put your data at risk.  Wether your upgrading windows on your local PC, Upgrading your server OS, your website software, or any addons.    There could be a problem with the steps you follow, the environment on your machine (god forbid your almost out of disk space), a problem if your machine craps out 1/2 way through the process... etc, etc, etc.

That aside. the 'Download & Install' from the module manager is functionally equivalent to downloading the .tar.gz (or .zip) file, ftp'ing the files overtop of your existing ones, and running the upgrade process. Infact, that's exactly what it does, it just does it in (as far as you can see) one step.

The best practice is always 'backup first'.  The second best practice is 'test it for yourself'.  Thirdly, you could wait for somebody else to do it first, and ask 'did it work okay for you?'.

You should always have a backup that's acceptable and TESTED before doing any upgrades (to anything).  Next, if you're concerned about stability, and about your website being up and continuous as much as possible, then maybe you should have a 'stage site' that you can continually restore from backups of your live site, and you can test things like upgrading modules, etc.

I've never had problems with upgrading the FrontEndUsers module and losing data.  I've introduced bugs (sometimes they have been critical, but those were usually 'betas') .  Though it is still possible, and your mileage may vary.  Though there have been upgrade problems with some other modules, resulting in not necessarily data lost, but functionality lost and downtime.

There's a simple religion.  If you make backups religiously ((cough) like you pay for your insurance policy) then you'll probably never use them.  If you don't..... You'll most definately wish you had.

[moorezilla]

Thanks for the quick reply.

It's as bad as I thought; I have to take some responsibility! 

I know this isn't the right place, but what are the chances of getting the next frontendusers to dump data to a csv or sql text file as part of the admin area? This would be sweet and it would make backups easier. It would also be a sweet piece of functionality any way, as it would be easy to move the users around to other applications.

Thanks again for a great module.

am

[calguy1000]

Uhn, done   FEU has exported users to CSV for a while..... I just recently added importing

[moorezilla]

how the hell did i miss that?

i'm revoking my forum posting privs for a while... lol.

thanks again.

[codepoet]

I learned the hard way that upgradingthe calender module restored the default smarty templates, which was a bit of a shame.  Fortunately I a DB backup that I could fish my modified templates out of, however some people would suggest that the upgrade script for that module could be improved in this regard.