Backup and restore

Hello, I did this over the summer.

In order to successfully backup and upgrade I created a complete duplicate of everything (renaming it with the version number of moodle it was from).

I then followed the directions to upgrade to 1.6, this overwrote the original moodle folder and modified the moodledata and the database. (you don't have to move backups if you do this)

I followed the directions to update the data to UTF-8, and once the computer agreed that moodle1.6 was working I went to 1.7 and then to 1.8.

At each step I created a duplicate of the final version so that if I had a problem I didn't have to go back to the beginning again.

When I was done my htdocs looked like this...

/moodle
/moodle1.5
/moodle1.6
/moodle1.7
/moodle1.8

where I store moodledata looked like this.

/moodledata
/moodledata1.5
/moodledata1.6
/moodledata1.7
/moodledata1.8

and my database looked like this
moodle
moodle_15
moodle_16
moodle_17
moodle_18

The version with the standard name ended up in Moodle1.8 and all of the others are redundant backups. Of course the directions tell you to tar the files as back ups, but then if you have a problem, you have to untar the file. and if you aren't careful it overwrites the other version of the folder.

Obviously you don't need all of the backups once the process is complete you can delete all of the extras.

Make sure that if you do any thing with one of the other folders (backups) you edit the config.php so that it is pulling info from the correct version of the moodledata and the database.

Any way, I hope this helps.
Sandra King