Upgrade 6 to the latest (6.2?)

I would like to upgrade a production site to the latest version of the software but I am not sure on what the process should be. 
Is there a clear and concise document available? 
I'm finding posts but they all seem to be rather convoluted and involve Visual Studio. I am interested in the bare bones process on a site that doesn't have any customization except to the UI templates.

Hi John,

The entire process is listed here. Visual Studio is always required at some point as your website needs to be recompiled.

Dear John

Here is how I do it for small 'unimportant' sites.

1) make backup of SQL Database
2) I connect FTP and download the whole site that is online (my local folder is named sitefinity)
     You could also make a copy on the server to save download time :-)
3) make a new folder sitefinity 6.0.xxxx and copy the downloaded version over
-> we now should have a backup of the database and the web (project)
4) Start up the next needed verions of the sitefinity manager accoring to the update instrucitons. In your case that would be 6.2.4910 and fire it up
5) import your project (the downloaded one - in my case folder sitefinity)
6) perform the update/upgrade (make sure the project is not open in VS)
7) now I use codecompare to compare my web.config to the newly created web.conig out of the _EmptyProject that was created by the SF manager. 
8) follow the instructions of the update documentation to the point. The web.config changes can be made of course manually instead of code compare, import references.
www.sitefinity.com/.../upgrade
9) now open VS and your SF solution, make sure everything is included in the project. Sometimes when you download via FTP you see bin for example but its not included in project (right click include)
10) build your project - make sure that if you use external stuff that references to new Telerik stuff works as needed.
11) download the sitfinity.lic that matches domain and vrsion
12) upload bin and web.config to server
13) acesss the site - wait and select the downloaded sitefinity.lic from step 11
14) after that everything should be ok - When I get an error I usually forgot something like include the App_master folder in project before building or so.
15) downlaod the App_Data/Sitefnity/configuration so you have a local matching project in your folder sitefintiy

Important

a) we are playing with the life database here!
b) we perform the db update on the life server
c) important projects I use a staging envirement - dont forget to change app_data/sitefinity/configuration/dataConfig.config or you by accident play with the live database

These (I hope I got them all) are my steps for simple small business sites. Worst case scenario is that the upgrade somehow fails. I then simply (which has not happen yet) use my backups to restore the old version. So the site might be down 30 min. But that's usually I risk I can take compared to the hassle of staging, testing, copying, migrating whatever.

Hope this helps.

Markus

Hi,

Thank you Markus and Arno for sharing this information with the community.

You could follow our Sitefinity upgrade documentation. To download a new version of Sitefinity please refer to this article. 

Regards,
Stefani Tacheva
Telerik

Stefani,
I'm sorry but the directions that you directed me to fall apart at step #4. That menu selection does not appear on my login.

Thanks Markus
I will give this a try.