Hi,

Currently my site is running with DNN 4.9.5

I am planning to upgrade it to 5.2.x

I can take a Database backup of prod site and bring it down to DEV and do an upgrade and ship it back.

But my concern is, how to manage the data that gets changed after back up is taken and before upgraded database is uploaded?

How do we manage if new users signup or make forum posts etc?

Is there a way to do it without shutting down the live site?

Any suggestions welcome

Agree with Jeff. To minimize down time, you might want to replicate DB on the live server and duplicate DNN files and run the upgrade, after this it is just a matter of changing the portal alias or virtual directory settings. In any case I would still like to do it first on the development box as every environment has some surprises, not because of DNN but because of the environment settings.

You will always lose data if you overwirte a database with an older version.  The solution is to not allow this to happen.  So you either take the system offline to work through your process or you upgrade live so there are no changes.

There is a third option, and that's to merge the databases.  But no way will I try to walk you through that.  If you had the skill and ability, you wouldn't have asked this question.  And without experience in managing SQL databases, and direct access to both databases, your chances of royally fubaring the system are about 100%.

Jeff