I made a duplicate of my entire vBulletin 3.8.4 - First the file system then created a new database and made a full SQL dump from my original database in to a new database. I don't use Impex, it seems to give varying results.
All I had to change was my cloned config.php file, so it pointed to the 'cloned' database and not the 'live' one.
From there, I upgraded to vBulletin 4.0 - with 3 failed attempts, but because it was just data that had been changed, I just re-dumped the SQL back in each time. Probably, the easiest and quickest way of doing an upgrade without breaking your 'live' site.
|