Question
Which to use? I've got an old server I need to upgrade
- Posted on February 20, 2025
- Technical Development
Asked by mindzipper
I’ve been gone for a LONG time, with nearly a year in the hospital. I’ve had a droplet running since 2017, which was being updated regularly.
The only thing left on it now is a forum. I’m using XenForo. I decided to upgrade to the latest version, but I’m stuck now.
The latest build of Xen requires PHP 8.x. I’m still running 7.x, so I poked through the DO Marketplace today, and I don’t see a single control panel-based droplet that comes with PHP 8x
Am I missing something? I’d run an upgrade on the existing server, but it’s been running standalone for over a year now, and when I looked, my rotating maintenance crons haven’t been running, so it has not rebooted for 483 days.
I don’t want to touch it until I have a backup in case it implodes, but I’m unsure what the best approach is.
Should I spin up a new droplet using one of my backups or snapshot and try to upgrade that to 8x? I’m worried this isn’t going to be a straight-line upgrade, and it’s going to have issues, but I’m even more concerned about having a server that has a buttload of service updates needing done that hasn’t been rebooted in so long.
Suggestions?
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Heya,
What I’ll recommend you is to create a Snapshot of your Droplet
https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/snapshots/
Snapshots are on-demand disk images of DigitalOcean Droplets and volumes saved to your account. Use them to create new Droplets and volumes with the same contents.
Then try to update/upgrade the packages and then even upgrade your Droplet to a new distro. That way even if it breaks beyond repairing you can just use the Snapshot to return it back to it’s original state.
It should be easier rather than creating a new Droplet and configuring everything to work on it like it does on your current one. That is my experience at least.
Hello, @mindzipper
You can always spin up a new droplet to your exact specs and install the needed packages. You can then test if XenForo is running without issues.
If you decide to upgrade the current droplet then make sure to create a backup of your data before you start the process.
Regards