We have been happily using OTRS 1.3.1 on Suse 9 since 2005 and it has been working flawlessly (I know v1.3.1 is very old but works the way we want it so there has never been an incentive to upgrade!) .

A feature we use is FreeText fields which we pre-fill using an sql statement in a Perl script that is run when an new ticket with a keyword in its subject field is automatically moved to a certain queue.

With OTRS 1.3.1 we can have up 8 FreeText fields and when you zoom in on a ticket all these are displayed on the right of the window. However, when you click on the 'Free Text' option only 4 FreeText fields are presented for editing!

I am sure this has been fixed in a later version of OTRS but is it something easily fixed in the present version by editing a file/files?

This brings me to thinking about upgrading as our system is old but we only have our working system and we have no backup system that I can test a upgrade on. Also, I have inherited the OTRS system so I do not know much about it.

Question:

From reading the various documents it seems that the process of upgrading OTRS must be done in steps. Am I correct in that I cannot go from version 1.3.1 straight to the present version but must do it in steps. If I am correct, what steps must be taken to get up to the current version of OTRS?

Question:

Reading the UPGRADING file that came with version 1.3.1 (I see that it is present in every subsequent release) one of its points says "Backup everything (database, Kernel/Config.pm, Kernel/Config/GenericAgent.pm, var/*)".

I can backup the files and directories mentioned but is there any documentation of how to backup the MySQL database as I have little experience with it?

Thanks

Paul