Drupal Tips: The quick and dirty way to run Drupal site updates

Sometimes we get requests to update Drupal sites and get it done in less than 5 hours. If we take the Drupal update through the full fail-safe set of steps for Drupal updates we will never be able to complete updates in less than 5 hours on a site we don't maintain. For such sites when the cost of the site going down may not be too high for the site owner it might not be too big an issue if the update is run on a hit or miss approach. We normally do not recommend such an approach but this should work on most small sites without any issues.

• Take a full backup of the Drupal database and files in the webroot
• Take the Drupal site offline
• Update Drupal core if it has updates
• Run update.php
• Update all Drupal modules that have updates
• Run update.php
• Take site online
• Wait for issue reports from site owner / users to see if something went wrong.
• If most things are working fine but there are minor issues then fix the specific minor issues.
• If something went terribly wrong then restore the backup and call it a day

We do not recommend such an approach on sites where you cannot afford to have any down time. But if you think it is ok to risk the Drupal site being out for a while you are free to try this approach out. As long as you have the full backups taken you can always restore the Drupal site back to what it was if something goes wrong.