alright seems like I have to upgrade my Debian version on my instance's server to get newer dependencies directly from the repos - is there anything I should think of besides stopping all the services beforehand and stuff?

@MagicLike Are you on Debian 12 stable (bookworm) or oldstable 11 (bullseye)?

If you're on either of these, maybe enabling backports and/or LTS might be enough for your needs?

https://backports.debian.org/
https://wiki.debian.org/LTS

@Soblow currently still on 11 and I already have backports enabled - but I need at least redis 6.2, the repos only offer 6.0.16...

@MagicLike Alright, then you should distupgrade to at least Debian 12.

Debian 13 will be published in a few months (weeks?) so it's a bit too soon to upgrade.

Before upgrading, make sure to make backups

Also, Debian provides a guide for dist-upgrading from Debian 11 to Debian 12. https://www.debian.org/releases/bookworm/amd64/release-notes/ch-upgrading.en.html

@MagicLike The TL;DR is:

• stop all non-vital services
• backup
• backup 2 (including system config if you want)
• backup 3 (just in case)
• edit your sources.list files to replace bullseye with bookworm, also disable all repos that aren't official debian repos for now.
• If you had backports/lts enabled, disable them for now
• apt clean
• apt update
• check that you have enough space
• apt upgrade

• apt dist-upgrade

• reboot and pray

@MagicLike The TL;DR is:

• stop all non-vital services
• backup
• backup 2 (including system config if you want)
• backup 3 (just in case)
• edit your sources.list files to replace bullseye with bookworm, also disable all repos that aren't official debian repos for now.
• If you had backports/lts enabled, disable them for now
• apt clean
• apt update
• check that you have enough space
• apt upgrade

• apt dist-upgrade

• reboot and pray

@MagicLike Don't dist-upgrade to Debian 13 (trixie AKA testing for now) for now as it will cause issues with how they changed the way repositories are built.
Also it's not yet stabilized so the upgrade process may be problematic

@Soblow I really don't like the pray part

If I had an internet connection with enough bandwidth I would probably make a backup to my Laptop but with this really German connection I think I will just trigger a Hetzner Backup/Snapshot of my VM and go with that...

@MagicLike I mean, worst case scenario the system no longer boots, as long as you have a copy of the data/configs you can create a new machine from scratch.

It's very rare that a debian upgrade doesn't work (citation needed)

@Soblow yeah with the Snapshot I can just shutdown and go back to the previous state if needed I think that is the best option here (will trigger a manual backup anyway)