Another upgrade path question - 3.4.9 to 5.4x
Asked by Rob Murray:

Hi,

We're seeing some confusing messages here within the support portal regarding the upgrade process.

We were under the impression that the upgrade path is as follows:

Manually upgrade 3.4.9 to 3.5.17;

New upgrade procedure from 3.5.17 to 4.3.7 to finally 5.x

Rumor has it that the upgrade step from 3.5.17 to 4.3.7 will convert the markup language to XHTML ; missing the 4.3.7 upgrade step can possibly cause issues.

Clarification will be much appreciated!


Answers:
author: Ryan Goodwin
body: The reason that Atlassian recommends not going to 4.x is that Confluence borks embedded links for some rare link types. This was fixed in 5.0.3 which is why Atlassian recommends not upgrading through 4.x. If you do have some Confluence pages with links to local/SAN/other types of links (think non-standard link types here) the upgrade to 4.x carries the risk of not processing them correctly to the new XHTML storage format.

They may have added a post-function to try and remigrate these, but in my experience with support, it became an issue of manually updating xxxxx number of confluence pages with these non-standard links. Usually the non-standard links were to other types of issue trackers or file storage systems that had proprietary url links instead of standard ones.

If this is something that you might worry about, skip the 4 series and go to 5.0.3.

comments: author: Rob Murray
body: OK. Thanks for the reply and help guys, very much appreciated!


author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: The only way to be sure is to test it. However,

You absolutely must get to 3.5.x first. (I say x because jumping to 4.something does work for 3.5.11, 3.5.13 and 3.5.17, and probably the ones between as well. But I'd strongly recommend .17)

It is possible to jump to 5.0 from 3.5. But I don't recommend it. Go through 4.something

You're right about the conversion - both 4 and 5 will see "ohh, wiki markup, need to convert that"


author: Timothy
body: This is the official guide ([](https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Upgrading+Confluence)<https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Upgrading+Confluence>). There is a matrix there you can use.


author: Rob Murray
body: OK, Thanks Timothy - I've seen that Matrix. It goes 3.4 to 3.5.17 to 5.03 to 5.5. This sounds good, as 5.x will convert markup to xhtml as Nic mentioned.

Nic, it's interesting to hear (or see) that you recommend going from 3.5.17 to 4.x instead of from 3.5.17 to 5.x seeing as 5.x will perform the markup conversion.

Is there any specific reason as to why you recommend 4.x as part of the path?

Thanks again guys

comments: author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: Three miserable failures to jump from 3.5.17 to 5.something basically, and no successes yet (although I'm about to trial it on a fourth site tomorrow)

I should say that we didn't go into a lot of detail about why it failed so I don't know exactly why. The 3.5-\>4 we had trialled before worked fine each time. The sites are also large, with quite a lot of plugins and complex usage.

Tomorrow's site is of a moderate size and the only plugin I'm worried about is the Zen one (mainly because of my inexperience with it, not the actual plugin). So it might well be fine.


author: Rob Murray
body: So based on past experience, I'm gathering that you've had issues going through the process without including version 4 in your upgrade path-


author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: That's what I said, yes.


Tags: confluence-administration