Patch first on a site clone.

Dolphin Pro 7.2 is a major upgrade to Dolphin.  I strongly suggest to anyone thinking of upgrading a 7.1.x site to 7.2 to first attempt the upgrade on a clone of your site.  This will avoid bonking a live site and taking it offline.  By first upgrading a clone of your site, you will see where problems will exist in the actual upgrade of the live site.  It will also allow you to test your site after an upgrade to see where things might have been broken by the upgrade thus preventing support calls from your members.

This, very much so. Part of our upgrade process is to make a test site and run the upgrade there, then have the owner look over and let us know if there are issues (in case we don't spot anything ourselves). Then once any issues are resolved in the patch files, we'll make a site backup and run the upgrade for real.

After the test site is successfully upgraded, can I just go to Cpanel and copy all the files over to the production site?

You could copy the files and database if your live site has not had any new content.  The idea here is that if you have a site where there has been some custom work done then you would want to test first on the clone to prevent crashing your live site and perhaps so badly that you can not recover it.  I have never upgraded my site directly, I have always tested on a clone first and therefore, could fix any issues without crashing my live site.  Yes, it is doing it twice but better safe than crying over a lost site.

oh, I forgot about the database. 

Hi

Forgive me if this sounds like a stupid question
but how exactly do I make a clone site?

Can you explain the steps needed please?

Many thanks

Hi

Is this the way to clone a site or is there something else I should do?

1. Copy the files into another directory
2. Export the database
3. Create a new database
4. Import the original database into the new one
5. Change the database info and directory path in /inc/header.inc.php to reflect the new database and directory info.

Many thanks

go to Cpanel, copy the whole website folder to another folder that is tied to another domain name, which should be your test site/domain name.

go to myPHPadmin (also within your Cpanel), locate your database, export all tables and data and save it somewhere on your computer. then, go back to Cpanel, go to MySQL Database, create a new database and assign a user with full control of the database.

go back to myPhpAdmin, import the saved information from your local computer to the newly created database. 

after all done, go to the header inc file and change the domain name to your new/testing/clone domain, directories, and database name, username, and password. 

By using Cpanel, all the permissions will stay intact. You may face the 404 error for all the modules, it's because the .htaccess file was not copy over. This case you can use any FTP client to transfer the .htaccess file from the downloaded dolphin package, or from the production site. 

Many thanks Luclonely