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• The build.properties configuration file has been replaced by an enhanced local.cfg configuration file. The new local.cfg allows you to easily override any configuration (from dspace.cfg or modules/*.cfg files) by simply copying it into your local.cfg and specifying a new value. It also provides enhanced configuration options as detailed in the Configuration Reference documentation. The old build.properties file is no longer used nor supported.
  • WARNING: As part of adding this new configuration scheme, many of the configuration settings in DSpace (primarily those in modules/*.cfg files) had to be renamed or prepended with the name of the module. This means that 5.x (or below) configurations are no longer guaranteed to be compatible with 6.x. If possible, we recommend starting with fresh configs (see below), and moving all your locally customized settings into the new local.cfg file.
• The PDF Citation Cover Page configuration file has been renamed (from disseminate-citation.cfg to citation-page.cfg). See this features documentation for more details.
• The legacy search engine (based on Apache Lucene) and legacy Browse system (based on database tables) have been removed from DSpace 6.0 or above. Instead, DSpace now only uses Discovery (based on Apache Solr) for all Search/Browse capabilities.

• The DSpace Lightweight Networking Interface (LNI), supporting WebDAV / SOAP / RPC API, has been removed from DSpace 6.0 or above. We recommend using REST or SWORD (v1 or v2) as a replacement. However, if you still require it, the old (unmaintained) LNI codebase is still available at https://github.com/DSpace/dspace-lni

• Support for SRB (Storage Resource Broker) file storage has been removed from DSpace 6.0 or above.  As it was unmaintained (and seemingly unused) for many years, this feature was removed along with its configurations. As a replacement, a new file storage plugin system was added, featuring a traditional local file storage option (default) and an Amazon S3 file storage option (see Storage Layer documentation, especially Configuring the Bitstream Store). For more information on the removal of SRB support, also see DS-3055.
• The user groups Administrator and Anonymous cannot be renamed or deleted.  If you had renamed them, they will be renamed back to the stock names during the upgrade.  DSpace is now dependent on these specific names due to internal changes.
• XPDF PDF Thumbnail generation has been removed. Please use the ImageMagick or PDFBox thumbnail generators instead.
• The default strategy to create new handles for versioned Items has changed. If you have Item Level Versioning enabled and you have versioned Items in your DSpace installation, you may want to change the configuration to continue using the mechanism to create handles as it was in DSpace 4 and 5. You can find more informations here: Item Level Versioning#IdentifierServiceOverride.

Backup your DSpace

Before you start your upgrade, it is strongly recommended that you create a backup of your DSpace instance. Backups are easy to recover from; a botched install/upgrade is very difficult if not impossible to recover from. The DSpace specific things to backup are: configs, source code modifications, database, and assetstore. On your server that runs DSpace, you might additionally consider checking on your cron/scheduled tasks, servlet container, and database.

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