Having built several Drupal sites, I live in fear of wrecking them! I hate doing upgrades and always get messages that I should upgrade AGAIN due to some new patches. Any tips for a properly structured regime to keep my sites up to date without risk of losing what I've built up over the years (including added modules and minor customisation of CSS/php) Thanks P
Backup the database and be sure to keep a local copy. Backup all your files (or at least your module files if upgrading a module) and be sure to keep a local copy. that's really all i do. FWIW, if upgraded modules hundreds of times or more, and only run into a problem ONCE, so i'd say module upgrades are pretty safe. Doing core updates/upgrades are a bit more scary, but my crash&burn rate has been very low.
I usually backing up database and /sites folder which usually have all additional modules, themes and uploaded content(images, PDFs, etc)