Back Up Your VIs

If you back up your VIs before you upgrade LabVIEW, you can quickly revert to the backup copy. Without the backup copy, you can no longer open upgraded VIs in the previous version of LabVIEW without saving each VI for the previous version.

You can back up a set of VIs by submitting VIs to source code control. This action allows you to revert to this version of the VIs if you cannot address behavior changes caused by upgrading the VIs.

Back Up Your Machine Configuration

Installing a new version of LabVIEW updates shared files in ways that sometimes affect the behavior of VIs even in previous versions. However, after you update those shared files, it is very difficult to restore the previous versions of the files. Therefore, consider one of the following methods for backing up the configuration of NI software on your development machine, especially if you are upgrading from an unsupported version of LabVIEW or if downtime for your applications would be costly:

• Create a backup image of the machine configuration—Use disk imaging software to preserve the disk state of the machine before you upgrade, including installed software, user settings, and files. To return the machine to its original configuration after you upgrade, deploy the backup disk image.
• Test the upgrade process on a test machine—Use a test machine, commonly a virtual machine, to test the upgrade process. Although upgrading on a test machine requires more time than creating a backup image, NI strongly recommends this approach if you need to prevent or minimize downtime for machines that control or monitor production. After resolving any issues that result from upgrading on the test machine, you can either replace the production machine with the test machine or replicate the upgrade process on the production machine.
  Tip To minimize the possibility that upgraded VIs on the test machine behave differently than on the development machine, use a test machine that matches the features of the development machine as closely as possible, including CPU, RAM, operating system, and versions of software.