question from an ignorant webmaster

[Interested bystander]

I've been running an SMF forum for a little over a year now.  I started out with 1.1.10 (I think) and upgraded each time a new one came out and I'm currently at 1.1.13.   OK, I have my website spread out over two different webhosts.   I recently installed 2.0 RC5 on my other host so I could play around with it while still using 1.1.13 for my visitors.   There are several improvements that my moderators and I really like about 2.0 RC5 so I would like to move my database over and invite some users in to try it out and if everything still goes fine maybe migrate everyone over in a few months.   Can this be done, moving a copy of the DB, and if so how would I go about it?  Thanks for any help you can give.

[Arantor]

Not really, no, because the databases are very different.

You can perform an upgrade using the 2.0 RC5 Large Upgrade package but that is designed to go over the top of an existing 1.1.x install and perform the necessary conversions to make it 2.0 RC5.

[Illori]

you can setup a test install like you have done, but any and all changes will need to be redone on the live site once it is upgraded as you will not be able to easily merge the old site with the changes you have made on the test site.