XF 2.2 Issues from a 2 year gap between test site and X2 upgrade

While IT literate, I'm not technical savvy enough to manage my own site, so I use VPS managed services through a host.

My current issue is one that my host cannot solve, and they have been an uncooperative partner since changing ownership about a year ago. I've recently switched hosts, but my issue isn't necessarily with a host, it's with an issue in upgrading our gaming community to X2.

We've had a X1 gaming site for years (www.tenaciousgamers.com), and in early 2018, we built a test site (www.tenaciousgamers.com/xen2) to configure our Xenforo2 upgrade and also to get rid of legacy X1 add ons and install X2 installs and also a X2 theme.

The issue really is that life happens, and because of various circumstances, it took us about 2 years, on and off here and there when we had time, to finish configuring our test site to how we wanted it. We installed and tested all of our X2 add ons and installed and configured a Xen2 theme.

Fast forward to 2020 and we wanted to complete our upgrade, not realizing that we would lose all of the forums and information on our community site that had been collected and posted over that 2 year span. If we launch our test site as our main site now, it only has forum posts and information up to when we first started the test site in 2018.

My question is: Do we have to start all over, or is there a way to launch our test site as our upgraded main site and include the last 2 years worth of forum posts and information?
 
Content can only be posted to one database.

As soon as you made a copy of your live site, it was never going to be updated with content posted on your live site.

Presumably you have a backup of your main site.

You can restore that to recover all of the lost content, then work on upgrading it.
 
I do have a cPanel .tar backup of our live site, which includes the Xen2 test site files.

I have all of the Xen2 add ons downloaded and made screenshots of how we configured them. We've also taken a lot of time to configure the theme. Would the best thing be to take down the live site, remove all of the legacy add ons, upgrade to Xen2, reinstall the Xen2 addons, reinstall the theme, and relaunch it?

And thank you for the reply btw
 
Typically this is the process for doing an upgrade which is more involved - e.g. second or first point release.
  • Create a test/copy of the live site
  • Upgrade the test site and document the process required to resolve all issues
  • Take a backup of the live site
  • Upgrade the live site and use the notes taken when upgrading the test site
 
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