I recently upgraded 4.9 to 7.0.1.

It is definitely backwards compatible, just download umbraco here http://our.umbraco.org/contribute/releases

First of all, make a back-up of the whole site and the umbraco database.

Then you just start merging folders one by one from the installation archive to your website root folder.

However you would have to carefully go through files in /config and web.config and make sure you update them properly (even though it could take a while), don't overwrite them!

You would have to rebuild Examine indexes and probably reinstall packages . Some of my custom datatypes disappeared but it wasn't hard to remake them.

My umbraco database needed some changes too, I will sum them up here:

ALTER TABLE [dbo].[cmsMacroProperty] drop CONSTRAINT [DF_macroProperty_macroPropertyHidden]
go

ALTER TABLE [dbo].[cmsMacroProperty] ADD  CONSTRAINT [DF_cmsMacroProperty_macroPropertyHidden] DEFAULT ('0') FOR [macroPropertyHidden]
GO

ALTER TABLE [dbo].[cmsMacroProperty] 
ADD CONSTRAINT [FK_cmsMacroProperty_cmsMacroPropertyType_id]
FOREIGN KEY (id)
REFERENCES [dbo].[cmsMacroProperty](id)
GO

ALTER TABLE [dbo].[cmsMacroProperty] drop CONSTRAINT [FK_umbracoMacroProperty_umbracoMacroPropertyType]
go

ALTER TABLE [dbo].[cmsTagRelationship] drop CONSTRAINT [umbracoNode_cmsTagRelationship]
go

ALTER TABLE [dbo].[cmsTagRelationship]
ADD CONSTRAINT [FK_cmsTagRelationship_umbracoNode_id]
FOREIGN KEY (nodeId)
REFERENCES [dbo].[umbracoNode](id)
GO

Hope this helps! Btw, I updated umbraco only on my local development machine, I am still struggling with some problems while updating it on our actual website, but having done it once gives me hope :)

Rene,

You are a star! Thanks for the fantastically detailed response. It's enough to encourage me to attempt a local update knowing that it is possible!

Regards,
Darryl

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