Upgrading Jira Core

[Jason Lark]

Good afternoon

I am the admin of Jira (the first time being the admin) and I am far to be an expert... I have been searching a lot of information, but there is something which I have not clear still

I have been asked to upgrade jira from 7.1.9. The thing is that I would like to make a DB backup. I have not credentials for AWS and the DB is in Amazon RDS. All the official documentation on Atlassian talk about to backup with xml, but Amazon RDS does not allow it (as I have been told).

Please correct me if I am wrong relating with the DB

I have found info in here (https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjiraserver079/upgrading-jira-applications-manually-950288211.html) and other places

1) I need to do a back up in Amazon RDS

2) I need to create an empty DB to be connected from Jira

3) update the the new DB with the old DB (but.. how? it should be a xml but there is not. Then should I just create a copy of the original DB and leave the original as Backup?)

4) In case I need to rollback the whole process of upgrade, in case answer of step 3 is creating a copy of original, should I just point to the old one?

Note: should not be updated the DB with the new Jira core version? if I just make a copy... how the DB is updated with the new jira version? maybe... is it not needed to update the DB?

Thank you in advance

[Jason Lark]

If you need more information to answer, I will be happy to answer