[Upgrade] 2.3.2 > 3.6.7: Use ImpEx or direct upgrade? (reasons inside)

[jw0ollard]

Hello,

I'm helping a friend do a major upgrade from vB 2.3.2 to vB 3.6.7.

I have plenty of experience with vB 3.x, and have also used ImpEx on a few occasions, but have no experience whatsoever with vB2.x. My question is: To use ImpEx or to not use ImpEx??

I'm aware I don't need to, but I have several reservations about using a direct upgrade method:

• The 2.x forums have several problems. The search function just doesn't work, and there are all sorts of unknown (to me) database modifications from vB 2.x hacks.
• Database size: 2.2GB
• ImpEx vB2 documentation says "No importing of avatars", which we actually think is a good thing. +1 for ImpEx.
• I'm under the impression that importing the data from the old DB will be MUCH cleaner and have less risk of something going wrong than doing a direct upgrade. Please correct me if I'm wrong!
• Being able to import the tables IN STEPS would seem to prevent things from going terribly wrong.

So, anyway. It seems like I have my mind made up, which I basically do.... But I want to know if there are any "negatives" or drawbacks to using ImpEx that I'm not aware of?

The one thing the documentation seemed to say could be a problem was PHP Memory Limits. I've had the PHP Memory increased to 128MB, at least until after the upgrade. It said that 64MB for 750,000+ posts should be OK, but the board I'm doing has 2.6M+ posts.

Should 128MB memory be enough?

Thanks in advance.

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EDIT: I'm very sorry... I didn't realize there was a forum for ImpEx. While this is also a general upgrade question, if you feel it belongs in the ImpEx forum please move it.

Sorry.

[Zachery]

Every id in the system will change period, userids, threadids, postids. You may lose some permissions on forums/usergroups.

[jw0ollard]

Every id in the system will change period, userids, threadids, postids. You may lose some permissions on forums/usergroups.

This is somewhat of a problem, as it is a highly linked to site.

However, I just carried out a "test direct upgrade" (not using ImpEx) on a duplicate of the old DB, and it was completely unsuccessful. Going to the index just gives an unspecified DB error.

[Zachery]

What exactly were the db errors?