Add-On Variable Data and the 1.7 patch

Stolen from the WoW forums and reposted here because those forum articles have a way of disappearing...

Users of AddOns with saved settings should know the following important information for how to upgrade to 1.7 without losing their settings.

The information presented below has already been posted in other threads; however, the information in those threads is buried among a bunch of other AddOn developer gobblty-!@!$. It is re-presented here in the hopes that AddOn *users* read it before they lose all their settings.

The following procedure is recommended for upgrading to 1.7:
1. Download the 1.7 WoW client patch.
2. Run the patcher.
3. (Optional) If you already have any newer versions of your AddOns available, go ahead and install them. If not, just go to step 4.
4. Run WoW.
5. When WoW tells you some of your AddOns are out of date and asks you if you'd like to load them anyway, say "Load Anyway".
6. Enable ALL of the AddOns whose variables you want to migrate to 1.7.
7. Make sure that version checking is disabled.
8. Load up your character.
9. Log out.

You should do all the above steps right away. Do not load up a character without your AddOns being enabled. If you do the above 9 steps, that should cause your saved variables to be migrated from the old 1.6 format to the new 1.7 format without losing data. After that, you can safely load up your character without all of your AddOns enabled until you get a chance to download the newer versions of the AddOns.

If you have more than one account, you need to do the above steps for at least one character on each account. You do not have to do it more than once for each account: all other characters info on the same account will be migrated at the same time.

Developers: please correct me if I've gotten anything wrong.

Users: please spread the word to all your friends so they don't have to come here next week asking where all their settings went (and so they don't get mad at you for not warning them about it when they find out all *your* settings are fine :-).

(This post has been edited to capture additional information from below. Thanks to those posters.)