SMF 1.1 to the latest 2.0.11, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly of my experience

[GrumpiGrampi]

I just finished upgrading my very old SMF 1.1 to the latest 2.0.11, and thought I might share this experience with you while it is still fresh in my mind. So here is The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly of my experience.
About a week ago I was made aware that my forum had stopped working for no reason. A support call to my long time hosting  company (Aplus.net) and I was told a lot of gobblelygook about it being a coding error, and not their problem, and to contact SMF support. (i.e. Passing the buck). She seemed to take great pride in the fact that she was a lot smarter then me, and it was up to me to figure it all out. In all fairness I want to say that Aplus is a great hosting company. I have been with them for 13 years, but sometimes you get a bad support person.
I spent several hours browsing the SMF and was finally able to ascertain that the Aplus server no longer supported the coding of the older SMF 1.1 php and SQL files when I recently modified my hosting package.
My SQL database had also disappeared from my server, and that took 2 calls to Aplus to get restored so I could archive them first before I tried to do an upgrade, incase something went wrong.
I made the mistake of first deleting all of the SMF 1.1 files, so of course my SMF 2.0.11 upgrade did not work. All I got was those cryptic error messages which meant nothing to me, and I had no idea what to do next. I even tried a new installation of SMF 2.0.11, and of course that backfired on me. I struggled with this for 2 days before it finally dawned on me how to proceed.
This is what I needed to do. First I deleted all of the SMF files on my server. Then I Re-installed SMF 1.1.
Then I copied all of the SMF 2.0.11 Upgrade files over the top of the SMF 1.1 files.
BINGO! That did the trick. All my previous forum data was intact and functioning. All I had to do then was answer a few simple questions when Lo & Behold, there was my forum intact and functioning. I was so happy I almost wet my pants.
I hope this experience will help others who are struggling with an SMF upgrade. I thing SMF is great forum software for a small to medium sized forum. I have only 120 registered users, but my the data is critical for genealogy research. I avoid Spammers by turning off online registration. I manually register each applicant's request by e-mail submission. I am a self taught webmaster with out formal training, so sometimes technical jargon eludes and confuses me. I think people who write code should never be allowed to write the help manual. They take too much for granted. They need to use the KISS system, and that goes for any online support people.

[Kindred]

Thank you for the process and for your comments...

please do note that our online manual and Wiki have not been written by the developers. We have a separate documentation team who works on that and has written all of the instructions there-in.