Magento upgrade from 1.7 to 1.8

Take a Code backup as well as DB backup before upgrade. Use SSH to upgrade. Follow below steps to upgrade..

  1. Open a command terminal.
  2. Go to your Magento directory by cd command like cd /var/www/yourmagento/ & run below commands step by step...
  3. chmod -R 755 lib/PEAR
  4. chmod 550 pear
  5. ./pear mage-setup
  6. ./pear channel-update connect.magentocommerce.com/core
  7. perl -pi -e 's/\r\n/\n/g' pear # if you uploaded from a windows computer?
  8. ./pear upgrade -f magento-core/Mage_All_Latest-stable
  9. chmod 550 ./mage
  10. ./mage mage-setup . (* notice the dot after mage-setup command)
  11. ./mage sync
  12. ./mage list-upgrades
  13. ./mage upgrade-all --force
  14. Open config.xml and change the statement SET NAMES utf8; SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=0; SET UNIQUE_CHECKS=0;
  15. Empty your cache,sessions
  16. Visit your site. It will take some time to loading depends on your data. Normally for 2 GB it will take 2 hours.

The Magento Connect Manager (System > Magento Connect > Magento Connect Manager) provides a nice way to upgrade - click the "check for upgrades" option, then select the latest version of Mage_All_Latest. After that you can pick and choose which non-core modules to update as well.

Surely lots of people are aware of this option, so why is it that nobody seems to suggest it? In all my Googling / StackExchanging / StackOverflowing I've not seen it suggested once. Does anybody know of a good reason this method is / should be avoided?