Smithyenator

Can anyone help me please?

Hello all, I am a XPEnology noobie and am hoping some nice person(s) could help me out. Firstly I wanted to say this software is amazing, I have been using XPEnology 4.3 for many many years now just in my local network and it’s veen fantastic. I am now looking to utilise my NAS more and setup various other utilities. So now it really is time for an upgrade. I also suggest I will be better secured against exploits upgrading too with known security issues on older versions. This is my current setup: NAS: HP Proliant N54L XPEnology 4.3 (Running as a ds3612xs with DSM 4.2 build 3211) This gets me to my questions, thanks so much in advance for any help you can give me: Q1. I wanted to update to a DSM of 6.1.x ideally. Can I just follow the DSM upgrade steps here (https://xpenology.com/forum/topic/7507-tutorial-installmigrate-dsm-52-to-602-juns-loader/?page=23 ) and literally: create a new boot disk (on new USB) Launch Synology assistant and run “Migration” Upgrade some of the packages I’m done? OR do I need to upgrade to DSM 5.2 first before going from 4.2 straight to 6.1? Q2. If I do need to upgrade to DSM 5.2 first how do I do this? Anyone have steps / guide? Q3. I have seen posts about people installing XPEnology using VMs rather than using these boot USBs. If I’m using this just for the purpose of media server, file server, docker container, home assistant etc is there any benefit setting up as a VM instead? Will I still be able to migrate my data from XPE 4.3 using this method? Q4. With every future XPEnology release do you always follow this upgrade method of creating new boot USB and migrating over? Or sometimes can you just follow the Synology On the box DSM upgrade? Thanks so much!!