Making a test "copy" of VB?

[mmackinnon]

Hey all

I emailed support but got no response so i thought i would ask here.

I have vb 3.5.4 now and am looking to goto 3.6 However, i have done alot of addons and modifications to my board and do not want to interupt the board itself until im sure i can get it working correctly.

So to the question:

Essentially, i want to make a copy of my current board to upgrade to 3.6 and see what happens. This board would not be live and not used for anything but testing updates and addons. Is this OK? If it is, how exactly can i make a pefect copy of the board currently? (yap im a newbie)

Thanks all for the help. Our board is free and the user count has just hit 300. If the board went down for a few days cause i screwed it up, i think we would lose alot of ppl.

[Ntfu2]

yes you can

[mmackinnon]

Ok

How is it done exactly?

[wilburshere]

make a folder called test on your webspace

and call forum test forum

its a very good option so you can test things out before doing to your live forum i recomend you do it

ive been using a test forum since buying the vb forum 2 years ago its a must have

[peterska2]

Make sure that you secure the directory with htaccess, and use a seperate database for the test forums.

Securing it is essential due to the licence agreement where you can have one non-public test board per licence, so having it secured makes it non-public.

Using a seperate database is essential also otherwise you make changes to your live database which will upgrade it and then you have already done it.

You can take a copy of your live database and import it into the test one to make it easier to find any problems as you have a copy of your live site to explore while checking for bugs.

[mmackinnon]

excellent !

So it isnt as simple as just copying over all the folders then is it? How can i make sure i do not have any "links" to the origional forum so i dont screw it up while im testing the upgrade?

[Caboose]

What I did was copy the current database to a test named "test" then simply uploaded all the Vbfiles. After the upload was done I ran the update.php and the rest was automated. As long as there are no plug ins or hacks it should work just fine.

[mmackinnon]

Ahh ok

I have alot of plugins and hacks currently. So would you suggest i simply load in the 3.6 in a test dir, then copy over the database? That would leave me a clean 3.6 install without anything but the users. Then after that reconfigure everything?

So when its all done i could just move the whole install to the primary directory?

that make sense?