Perhaps it would be better to upgrade a test database first

[Martin]

If you have the capability to do so, I would advise in the strongest of terms that you create a copy of your live database and test the upgrade there before trying it on your live forums, especially, if like me, you have an extremely large database you don't want to have to waste hours trying to restore.

[George L]

yup i agree.. here's how i do that

steps to upgrade (eva2000 method)

1. backup vB 2.3.5 database using ssh telnet and mysqldump command - a good article on this is at http://www.sitepoint.com/article/678

short version of commands to run

to backup

mysqldump --opt -u mysqlusername -p databasename > /path/to/backup.sql

2. backup vB 2.3.5 php/image and other forum html files etc and keep them in a safe place
3. create a new empty database i.e. named newemptydatabasename
4. still in ssh telnet, import your backup.sql you made in step 1 into newemptydatabasename

to restore/import into newemptydatabasename

mysql -u mysqlusername -p [b]newemptydatabasename[/b] < /path/to/backup.sql

5. download vB 3 beta3 from Members Area http://www.vbulletin.com/members/ and extract the files..
6. rename /includes/config.php.new to /config.php
7. edit /includes/config.php with your values and point the database name to newemptydatabasename (which is you copy of your vB 2.3.5 forum)
8. All files and folders in /upload folder need to be uploaded to your forum a/c
9. now if you're upgrading go to

yourdomain.com/install/upgrade.php

and go through the steps

notes on upgrade steps:
Certain steps are server intensive and take particularly long time if you have lots of posts i.e. 500,000+ posts

steps that particular take so time to do in upgrading:

6 = 'Upgrade Private Messages'
7 = 'Upgrade Users'
13 = 'Update Attachments #1'
14 = 'Update Attachments #2'
15 = 'Update Edit Post Log'
16 = 'Update Thread and Post Table'
17 = 'Update Posts to Support Threaded View Mode'

10. last step 43 will ask you to delete install.php, upgrade.php/upgrade1.php prior to logging into your /admincp panel

11. you now have upgraded to vB 3 beta3 on a copy of your vB 2.3.5 database data and your original vB 2.3.5 database is untouched - test the vB 3 beta3 forum and see if everything is okay and you may leave vB 2.3.5 if you want

[Russell]

unfortunately, not all of us have the luxury of being able to store two copies of our quite large db's on our server, and/or downloading that huge database either...

So we just have to dive straight in - but in this case, I'm giving it 2 days for people to find all the big evil bugs.

[George L]

unfortunately, not all of us have the luxury of being able to store two copies of our quite large db's on our server, and/or downloading that huge database either...

So we just have to dive straight in - but in this case, I'm giving it 2 days for people to find all the big evil bugs.

seriously though if you have problems holding that data on your server, might need to think about expansion of your hosting - adequate disk space isn't just for the upgrade ...

when you repair a database you need free space equal to at least the size of your database

[feldon23]

unfortunately, not all of us have the luxury of being able to store two copies of our quite large db's on our server, and/or downloading that huge database either...

DO NOT GO vB3 unless you can backup your forum!!!

I would hate to see crap like "vB3 hosed everything so we have to start over" or "Upgrading to vB3 destroyed our data".

Anyone losing ANYTHING in going from vB2 to vB3, even 1 post or 1 user, has only themselves to blame.

Anyone can get webhosting for $8-12/mo with enough space to store 2 copies of any reasonable forum and with several possible ways to download a good backup.

Hell, I set up an FTP on my home computer and scripted a cron job so that FeldonCentral.com logs into my computer and sends me a backup every night.


Hmm. Since PHP can send Gzip files and segment large files, maybe it's time to write advancedbackup.php that gzips your forum backup into /forum/dbbackup into 5MB sections.

[Steve Machol]

unfortunately, not all of us have the luxury of being able to store two copies of our quite large db's on our server, and/or downloading that huge database either...

Honestly then, you are probably better off waiting until vB3 final.

[KrON]

I'm in the midst of testing the upgrade process (to familiarize myself with it for when vb3 goes gold) on a scaled down version of our 3.5gb database (I'm using the real thing minus the contents of the attachment table), and quite frankly, I'm starting to wonder if I will ever run vb3.

I'm now on step 15 or so of 42, and I've been upgrading now for almost 24 hours straight.. I can't say that I'll be running vb3 if it means having to take my forums offline for a full day or more..

[aric]

I am lucky as I have just purchased vbuletin, so I think I will purchase the upgrade when the final 3.0 version comes out. Will that be in about a month?

[George L]

I'm in the midst of testing the upgrade process (to familiarize myself with it for when vb3 goes gold) on a scaled down version of our 3.5gb database (I'm using the real thing minus the contents of the attachment table), and quite frankly, I'm starting to wonder if I will ever run vb3.

I'm now on step 15 or so of 42, and I've been upgrading now for almost 24 hours straight.. I can't say that I'll be running vb3 if it means having to take my forums offline for a full day or more..

i replied to your other thread.. need some server values etc from you and i can see about tweaking the upgrade1.php script some

[Zecherieh]

I'm in the midst of testing the upgrade process (to familiarize myself with it for when vb3 goes gold) on a scaled down version of our 3.5gb database (I'm using the real thing minus the contents of the attachment table), and quite frankly, I'm starting to wonder if I will ever run vb3.

I'm now on step 15 or so of 42, and I've been upgrading now for almost 24 hours straight.. I can't say that I'll be running vb3 if it means having to take my forums offline for a full day or more..

When I did my upgrade, with about a two gig dbase I just jumped in and said hell with it.

Around that step it stopped. I watched my server and after a bit I said hell with it, mysql is not doing anything, and just manually went to the next step (I think it was 16 to 17 actually)

I had it stop a few more times, just hit refresh on those.

When the forums loaded up, everything was cool except I did not have two fields in my threads table. First postid and something else, didnt panic cause the post table had the info I needed, but funny thing is that as soon as I added the fields - it fired right up and worked

Just letting ya know my experiance with a a database larger than average

[TheEDIGuy]

For those running large, but not huge, forums, I just wanted to share that on our forum (3600 members, 250,000 posts, 11,000 threads, attachments, etc) it took me about 23 minutes from start to finish to upgrade. I was worried after reading some of the posts here, but this is acceptable to me.

[fury]

Including the counter updates? It was about a half an hour for the upgrade for me (460some members, 203k posts, 9k threads, and about 1k attachments) but over 5 hours for the counter updates (about 3 or so of this for the searchindex)

[Chris Blount]

If you are on your own dedicated server, doing a test run is very easy. Simply create an account at a different IP address, create a new blank database and import your current database to that new account using a backup database copy. Then load VB3 and have fun doing tests and tweeks without touching your "live" forums.

If you don't have enough space to run this test, you need a bigger hard drive in your server.

We ran this "beta" copy on our server for a week and everything worked great so we decided to upgrade our live forums this morning. Everything went off without a hitch and we even have a spell checker without hacking anything. Very cool!

[TheEDIGuy]

Including the counter updates? It was about a half an hour for the upgrade for me (460some members, 203k posts, 9k threads, and about 1k attachments) but over 5 hours for the counter updates (about 3 or so of this for the searchindex)

I didn't do the counter updates, if they weren't part of the upgrade instructions.

To complete the upgrade as noted above, 23 minutes. Of course, it's a copy of our live forum, not our actual live forum, so it was a "dry run" for the real thing, after Beta 4 maybe.

[Dezoris]

I have close to a 2Gb db.

I would have to also say if you are on a shared server or a weak dedicated solution, and your dump is close to 1Gb or above you might want to rethink the upgrade.

It took about 1 hour from start to finish to do upgrades, and about 6 hours to reindex and update counters etc.

And that is on a dedicated 2 processor machine.

I extended my php timeout and mysql timeout before attemping this as well, just to be sure.

I know when I was using PAIR on their best shared plan I had extensive problems dumping the database, and restoring it using command line was even worse.

I am with Evo if you don't have more than a couple gigs of storage space on a shared server with a big database rethink it.