Upgrading kodi 18.X to latest …



Hi

I have a raspberry pi 4 (8 gb) on my internal network to run my kodi instance. Media files are all nfs’d off onto a NAS box. The system has been rock solid for more years than I can remember … As it’s on my internal firewalled network I have never been worried about security issues, the kodi box can’t reach the internet, and the internet can’t reach my kodi box.

But all good things come to an end, right ? So I *really* ought to upgrade this box and run a modern version of kodi on it. My current kodi instance has a large database which has been carefully maintained (often manually, when auto-scraping fails …) so I really don’t want to loose it.

My normal method would be …

Backup the contents of the home directory where kodi runs to the NAS box (mainly to save the .kodi directory)
Rebuild the OS and the kodi software from an empty SD card
Copy the backup back into the new clean home directory …

Et voila  (I hope). But …

Does anyone know if the current latest kodi will accept the .kodi directory of the 18.X version that I am starting from ?
Is there anything I can do to help (remove my addons for example)
Is there anything else to be wary of ?

I know this is a big jump (3 full versions + various fractions), so I am a little anxious to hear real-world examples of updates that have worked well / updates that turned into horror stories / whatever …

I also know that I can probably perform this in multiple steps (18 -> 19, 19 -> 20, 20 -> 21) but that will be a lot more work. I’ll probably have to build my own versions of the down-dated kodi’s for example, as I’m guessing that finding an pi4 / kodi 19 package will not be possible.

So, any thoughts ?

— Chris