# 6.1-RELEASE to 8.2-RELEASE?



## pphalen (Sep 21, 2011)

Hi,

I have six servers running 6.1-RELEASE. I'd like to perform binary upgrades to 8.2-RELEASE. My understanding is that freebsd-update didn't become available until 6.2-RELEASE. Does that mean I need to do a 2-step upgrade (6.1 to 6.2 and then use freebsd-update to get to 8.2)?

I'm looking at this http://taosecurity.blogspot.com/2007/02/binary-upgrade-of-freebsd-61-to-62.html and wondering if it describes the same script as freebsd-update.

Thanks for any help you can provide.


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## phoenix (Sep 26, 2011)

The safest, and recommended, method for upgrading between large-gap releases (X --> X+Y) is:

upgrade to last release of X
upgrade to X+1.0
upgrade to last release of X+1
upgrade to X+2.0
upgrade to last release of X+2
...
upgrade to X+Y.0
upgrade to X+Y.whatever
Yes, it's a lot of steps.  But it's the only safe way to the upgrades.

IOW:

upgrade to 6.4
upgrade to 7.0
upgrade to 7.4
upgrade to 8.0
upgrade to 8.2

However, there have been so many changes between 6.x and 8.x that you'd be better off doing a fresh install of 8.2.


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## lme@ (Sep 29, 2011)

And be sure to have backups!


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