Is there a quicker way of upgrading my DNN install?

This is what I do now.

- Via FTP I download my wwwroot and latest database backup as a backup (takes at least 30 minutes)

- Download DNN Upgrade zip  and unzip onto my local machine

- Via FTP I upload the DNN Upgrade files to the server

- Access the website to complete upgrade.

Is there a better/faster way?

I tried using the HELM FileManager to make a copy of my wwwroot but that was really slow too. And that does nothing to get the upgrade package onto the server.

Thanks for your ideas. 

Drewmister

Your method is the safest method to make sure there is a recovery method for dealing with problems. If you have disk space available on your account one thing you could do is create a folder in your webroot, copy all your files from your webroot into this folder, and make sure your db backup is ok. Then you do the upgrade by uploading the files. This of course saves time by not having to spend the time to download the backups. if there is a problem you can then restore the DB backup and copy the files from the subfolder backinto the webroot. This works well for small sites and quick upgrades.

For major upgrades and or module compatibility testing I would recomend getting the files/db and restoring to a local and doing the upgrade on the local BEFORE tryting to upgrade remotly, it has saved my bacon a bunch of times. You can set you local host file, or modify your own DNS so that the webname is correct or modify the ALIAS table in the DNN database, so that this will work on a local machine.

Hope this helps

Rick