CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

We've recently inherited a site running CiviCRM 1.6.8061 on Drupal 5 and the client has asked us to upgrade it to the latest version of both the CRM and Drupal. Given that the version they have is almost six years out of date I'm guessing there is no straightforward upgrade path.

Well, there is actually a known and well-documented upgrade path. It just involves multiple steps.

Our obvious concern is whether the data structure has changed so much that it won't be possible to map the current fields/tables to the new version.

Yes, there is no way to just map things as the structure has changed significantly.

We could do a staged upgrade from 1.x to 2.x to 3.x to 4.x (assuming this is both possible and advisable) but that will clearly require a lot more work as we'll need to upgrade Drupal along the way.

Definitely possible. If it's advisable is a good question.

I'd be very grateful for any suggestions on the best way forward for this. It may well be more cost effective to build the new version and pay someone to re-enter all the data!

That's precisely the question--what is the most cost effective solution and that depends on your data. If you have 5 contacts and one custom field, then clearly you should install fresh and rekey your data. If you have, however, 500K contacts and 35 custom fields and 100K donations plus events and activities, then the 8-20 hours it will *probably* take to upgrade your site will be easier than trying to rekey the data. Perhaps it will take more than 20 if you don't know CiviCRM.

If, however, you are in between those two, then it's hard to say. There are reports on these forums of upgrades from 1.9 straight through to 4.2--I myself have done this more than once--but it's not always easy, as there are many things that can go wrong and it can involve a lot of upgrades along the way.