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Be careful, not sorry...

I strongly recommend approaching any new version of any software product with due caution.

At a minimum, before you run "Setup.exe," make two backups of every single product-related data file. In the case of Fusion, that means exporting templates (Site View, File, Export as Template) of every one of your NOD site project files.

Even better (but more time consuming), do two whole-system backups. Make sure to make Fusion Templates from all your current NOF projects part of those backups.

Why do you need to backup twice?

In a word: "safety."

  • Media fail,
  • Drives fail,
  • Systems crash, and
  • Data gets corrupted. What's even worse,
  • Sometimes backups don't restore.

As the saying goes, "S*** happens." If you're careful enough, "S*** that happens to you" won't cost you much time or effort in recovery.

Preferably, use two different external storage media like. CDR or RW, Zip disks, or zip up and ftp or copy across a network to another computer.

  • Do whatever it takes to get your data in two different places, in two different media formats.

Ideally, at least one copy of your backup data should go off premises. If your house or office building is destroyed, where is your data?

  • "Gone forever" is a bad answer to that question.
  • This is especially important if you have web development customers who are depending on you. This is not just "your" data!

FTP a zip file of each of your NOF template files and subdirectory contents to your web server. That is one easy way to protect your NOF data.

Or take a portable media copy of your data to another location. If your data is as valuable to you as mine is to me, store external backup media in your bank safe deposit box, or another similarly well-hardened place.

  • Test your ability to restore from these backups.
  • A backup is useless if you cannot restore from it in a time of need.

Test!

Test the new software version thoroughly before irreversibly committing any existing project to the new version. In Fusion, this means don't uninstall your previous version until:

  1. you have all your current work migrated to the new version successfully, and
  2. you have faith in the new version.

Depending on your circumstances, this may mean duplicating changes to your site projects in both versions for a while. Obviously, you won't be able to do some things in your previous version that you can do in Fusion 7 (like photo-galleries or multi-level navigation bars).

  • Don't let yourself be seduced by the new gee-whiz features.
  • Be safe, not sorry.

You do not want to end up in the circumstances I did a few years ago.

I stupidly uninstalled Fusion 4 as soon I was done converting my existing NOF4 site files to NOF5. I lost hundreds of hours of work to bugs in the early days of NOF version 5. That was a painful lesson that I don't want you to repeat.

Please don't take any of the preceding rant to mean that I think Fusion 7 will trash your data. However, I have learned the hard way not to implicitly trust the newest version of ANY software product.

I have had more problems with new versions of software from more vendors than I want to tell you about here.

The Bottom Line:

You won't be sorry to be a little too careful!

The three most important things to have before installing any new software upgrade are:

  1. Good backups
  2. Good backups, and
  3. The ability to restore from good backups.



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