Best Practice for new install and import very big database contents from old version

Howdy:

I just want to make sure I go about this the most efficient way.

I have a 15 year old site still in version 1.3.8a (I know... I know... it is what it is, please don't blast me about it being so outdated).

It has a fairly large database with over 22,000 orders and over 15,000 customers.

I am building a brand new site on a completely different server with the latest version and all I want to do is migrate all my customer data to the new site when I have the site ready to go.

I haven't worked in Zencart since about 2009 so I just want to make sure I approach this properly. What is my best course of action?

Thanks much

Best practice is to import the entire database and let the zc_install upgrader bring it up to date.

https://www.zen-cart.com/entry.php?3...he-new-version

Thanks very much. I have read over that page several times and was still confused so that's why I posted.

Sorry I'm still confused. So am I better off cloning the existing site as-is onto the new server and then running it through the upgrades or installing a new clean version on the new server and importing/upgrading the database only? I don't care about the template and customizations as they are minor and not going to apply to the new site anyway.

Nevermind, I see my answer in the part about keeping an existing store live. I'll follow that procedure. Thanks again.

Assuming that your new store is in the same hosting-account as the old one, you can use your webhost's cPanel / phpMyAdmin to copy (under the Operations tab) the existing database into a new one.

That would save you some time over exporting the existing and importing it into the newly-created one.