Upgrading an existing Drupal site

1. Make a backup of your Drupal instance.

2. Download the latest release of your current Drupal version.

3. Extract the [tar ball or zip] Drupal package.

4. Set your site on maintenance mode

5. Delete all the files & folders inside your original Drupal instance except for /sites folder and any custom files you added elsewhere.

6. Copy all the folders and files except /sites from inside the extracted Drupal package [tar ball or zip package] into your original Drupal instance.

7. If the update release includes changes to settings.php replace old settings.php in …/sites/default/ with the new one, and edit site-specific entries (eg database name, user, and password)

8. If you modified files such as .htaccess or robots.txt re-apply those changes to the new files.

9. Login to your site as administrator or as user no 1 ==> http://www.site.com/drupal717/?q=user

10. Run update.php by navigating to http://…yourdrupalsitename/update.php

11. Follow the process to update your Drupal instance

12. Disable maintenance mode