first SME is EOL in 3 months. Just wait for SME 10 to be at least RC in the next 2 months
Second thumbdrive is usually not a good idea with backups and i kind of remember that with sme backup it sometime is not able to finish backup. Use a powered drive please.
Of course i would advise to make tests on a test system but migrating to last version should do. Just not tried in our test, bit migrate scripts are mostly just added.
Thing is, if I do install SME Server 8 over the existing Server 7.6, will the emails still be there and readable under SME Server 8?
edit: Incidentally, I have been having a LOT of problems with the old system. For one thing, periodically it stops responding to the email programs. I wind up rebooting the machine from the SME Server web-interface, and maybe it goes back to responding to the email programs. The machine will also periodically stop collecting emails from my webspace provider's mail service. I can go to there and check, and it might have a day's worth of them accumulated that it hasn't collected. I can then reboot the machine and maybe it will start collecting the mails again, a few hours after the reboot. I don't know if something is going wrong with the drive, or the machine, or if some program simply crashes every now and then. It used to do this lunacy only every now and then, say, once every couple of months or something. Now it seems to be doing this a LOT. Like every DAY.
And then there are times when it stops responding to the web-interface altogether, either. I simply get a cannot-be-reached when I go to the web interface. I then have to go to the keyboard interface (via the KVM switch) log in from there and invoke
Init 6 from there to reboot.
I'm purely speculating here, but it's possible the drive might be failing. The machine reboots fine, from the monitor screen (via KVM switch) I can watch it go through the process of booting, with a flurry of doing this.... [OK] doing this next thing... [OK] and so on, with everything showing [OK] all the way up to presenting the login prompt. Trouble is, even after a reboot, today, I can't seem to get it to let me read new mails. Sometimes I have to initiate several consecutive reboots before it finally goes back to letting me pull up new mails.
I've also tried initiating a Reconfigure from the Reboot Or Shutdown pane of the web interface. My understanding is that a Reconfigure is a more sophisticated, more comprehensive sort of reboot where, if the machine was left in an unknown state -- say, because a lightning storm shut off the power to the machine, so it didn't do a proper shutdown -- the Reconfigure, so I understood, is what you're supposed to do so it analyzes what didn't get shut down properly last time, or whatever, and corrects it, before going back to normal operation. Today, I've tried initiating a Reconfigure two or three times. I was expecting it to then restart the machine within a few moments, but it doesn't seem to be doing anything of the sort. It just keeps doing lots of disk activity, but never actually reboots. Eventually I give up and issue a regular Reboot from either the web interface or from the command line (that is, from keyboard via the KVM switch after logging in there as Root) and can then watch it go through the normal reboot process all the way back to the Login prompt. But then I find I still can't pull up my emails.
Have I misunderstood what a Reconfigure command actually is?
In any event, my other issue is.... this is an OLD machine. It's using PATA. I have a new drive, ready for use with whatever newer machine I might use once I've gone to SME 9 or 10, but the new drives are all SATA, which the old machine can't read. (I could buy a PATA-to-SATA adaptor, but I'm told those are unreliable sometimes.) I COULD image the old drive onto a SATA, but then I'd have to either use an adaptor, on the old machine, or go to the newer machine earlier than I had intended.
The point I'm making is, I'm not sure I can wait the couple of months for version 10 of SME to get to RC status before migrating to a newer-than-7.6 version and/or to a new machine.
I also have NO way of knowing what might actually be going wrong under the hood of the current machine, all I know is it just stops responding sometimes. And then eventually, after much cajoling, and rebooting, and hurling space-opera cusswords at it... it eventually goes back to responding to the email programs and to collecting the mails from my webspace provider, for a day or so. This is driving me batty.
I'm also operating under the theory that maybe some of the programs on my machine got corrupted somewhere along the line, but that updating to version 8 for the time being (before then preparing to move to 9 or later on another machine), the fact that it's a fresh install of all the (newer-then-7.6) system, maybe everything will settle down and just flipping WORK for a good while instead of flaking out on an increasing regularity.