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1. Update to your latest minor release version first before upgrade to recent major release. A May 2017 example: a customer was considering an upgrade from 5.4.1 to 5.5.4 (latest release at that time). The correct sequence would have been: 5.4.1 → 5.4.12 → 5.5.4 instead of  5.4.1 → 5.5 → 5.5.4

   • Info

     Why we go that way? Because when customer report issues when migration of 5.4.6 to 5.5 for instance, then we will support a work around / patch and later release the fix also in 5.4.7. The fix of the issue in 5.4.6 when migrating usually located in version handlers. Then at some point, we drop 5.4.x because of out dated technology stack (such as Java versions and security support from 3rd party libraries), upgrade to 5.5.x, the process repeats. So going with latest release of each major release free you from issues and take advantage of improvements.

2. Carefully look for "change" or "changes for ..." sections in the release notes since.
3. Because the upgrade process takes time and is vulnerable to incidents, please minimize the risk by cleaning up your system, removing unused data, reindexing everything and doing a full backup first.

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