Upgrade procedure and resulting missing songs after upgrade

OldmacharChurch

Hi team

We just upgraded to the newest release 3.1.7.x and have a resulting question we are hoping you can answer:

What is the official upgrade procedure for moving between versions of OpenLP? Usually when we get a prompt we will follow the link to the download page, download the latest Windows msi and run it.

Having read the forum and bits of the manual we were under the impression configuration and song db persist between upgrades as well as a backup being taken during the upgrade procedure, however this has highlighted two potential problems:

We seem to be missing our songs that we have added to our song library over time. Tried importing from backups and it looks like over subsequent upgrades we have lost songs. Perhaps there is user error here and someone can advise?
When upgrading we are getting duplicate songs, not of our songs but the ones included as part of OpenLP. Then of course when we import a backup to try and recover songs we are duplicating these built in songs for a third time (this part we understand), however when we run the duplicate song removal tool it finds no songs? I can see there is already a form post here about this issue but I did not want to add to that as it is for a different OS and different OpenLP release. How is this tool supposed to work? Is there a better way to deal with the duplicates?

OldmacharChurch

We moved from EW6 awhile back and built our OpenLP song DB off the back of the EW and overtime made modifications.

If necessary we can start a new OpenLP song DB using the EW6 and build a better backup structure but hoping there is a better way to do what we currently are. We do still have all the backups from previous upgrades but are just perhaps "importing" them wrong.

jlgtx

For the record, I'm not an OpenLP developer, just a long-time user and appreciator.

The config and all the databases are supposed to persist across upgrades. If that's not happening, there may be an issue with one or more of the databases. I have experienced various issues in the 3.x series with database corruption of some kind; not in the song database (not that I recall or am aware of, at least), but definitely in images and presentations. I've had to clear and rebuild those databases from within OpenLP.

Version 2.4.6 was really the last "super stable" version, though it had some compatibility issues. The whole 3.x series has been a largely successful and much-needed attempt to modernize the functionality and feature set of OpenLP, but any development effort of this scale inevitably gives the software a definite "beta version" flavor.