Posted by echo on Tue, Jan 25, 2022 - 1:32pm

Thanks for the excellent upgrade docs + videos! I'm preparing my first D7 -> BD upgrade, a few questions...

* After the initial running of update.php after importing the D7 database, when docs read, "the update should be run again" for example after enabling a theme, does it mean simply run update.php, or like the initial migration, again import the prepared D7 database into a empty BD database? I think the former, noticing using the word "update" vs "upgrade".

* If we are repeating importing the D7 database into an empty database of the BD codebase, what triggers the need to do this, to keep site changes up to date?  

* Is why a last upgrade would be run on the production site, to keep site changes up to date?

* If it can be up to date, can a local final copy be deployed to production as if deploying a new site, rather than an entire migration (importing cleaned D7 database) done on production?

Much appreciated!

Accepted answer

@echo I'm going to provide a few general comments, hopefully some colleagues will chime in with additional details and more specific answers.

I can think of two main reasons to run the update multiple times. 

1) Because the first time you run it, things don't work as expected and you find you need to make some additional changes to the D7 site before running the update again to see if goes better. 

Sometimes you need to run through the process multiple times to get the best results. 

Maybe someone else can provide a good example of the kinds of problems that you discover after your first try. 

2) Your live site is changing all the time and you want to get the most recent content. Of course this is not always true and may not be necessary in your case. If you have a generally static site and are not making any changes to the Drupal 7 version during the upgrade process, this is not a problem. But, if you have a site with multiple editors and content is being added or edited during the process you will want to do a final upgrade to get all the most recent content. 

If the content is all up to date on your dev site, I can't see any reason why you must run the update/upgrade on production. There is no reason why you can't just move/copy your dev version to production. Again, this assumes that you are happy you have all the content you need on dev. 

I hope that this helps. Feel free to keep asking questions here.

 

Comments

Tue, Jan 25, 2022 - 2:18pm by stpaultim

@echo I'm going to provide a few general comments, hopefully some colleagues will chime in with additional details and more specific answers.

I can think of two main reasons to run the update multiple times. 

1) Because the first time you run it, things don't work as expected and you find you need to make some additional changes to the D7 site before running the update again to see if goes better. 

Sometimes you need to run through the process multiple times to get the best results. 

Maybe someone else can provide a good example of the kinds of problems that you discover after your first try. 

2) Your live site is changing all the time and you want to get the most recent content. Of course this is not always true and may not be necessary in your case. If you have a generally static site and are not making any changes to the Drupal 7 version during the upgrade process, this is not a problem. But, if you have a site with multiple editors and content is being added or edited during the process you will want to do a final upgrade to get all the most recent content. 

If the content is all up to date on your dev site, I can't see any reason why you must run the update/upgrade on production. There is no reason why you can't just move/copy your dev version to production. Again, this assumes that you are happy you have all the content you need on dev. 

I hope that this helps. Feel free to keep asking questions here.

 

Tue, Jan 25, 2022 - 2:37pm by echo

Thank you @stpaultim !
These points are my thinking as well.

I'm so happy with the Backdrop community, smaller but so attentive, a forum post never languishes with no response!

Olafski's picture

Wed, Jan 26, 2022 - 12:54am by Olafski

two main reasons to run the update multiple times.

(...) Your live site is changing all the time and you want to get the most recent content.

Interesting! Is it really possible to only get the latest state of content by running update.php with the D7 database? I'd be afraid the D7 database could overwrite other database changes (e.g. by installing modules) made in Backdrop.