Upgrading R Studio version

General
1

Sorry if my question sounds silly and very elementary, but I am currently using R Studio version 4.1.2 and I want to upgrade it to the latest version, 4.2.0. Now, I am not too sure about the most painless way to go about it, because in the past, I have tried to upgrade my R Studio software, only for me to lose most of my projects.

Therefore, do I first of all uninstall the previous R Studio desktop software and then install the latest one, or is there a better way to upgrade R and R Studio on my PC? Thanks in advance of your helpful suggestions.

2

That is not your RStudio version but your R version, they are not the same thing and they have independent versions.

On what operating system you are? The update process for R is different depending on the OS

3

Thanks, I am on Windows 10

4

On Windows, each R version gets installed independently so you get a separate package library, and even if you migrate your old package library to the new location (or point R to use the old one) you still have to recompile your packages after a major R version upgrade (e.g from 4.1.x to 4.2.x).

If you have too many packages and you can't keep track of what packages you would need to reinstall, you can move your packages from the old library folder to the new one (Be careful not to overwrite the content on the destination folder) and then automatically reinstall all packages for the new R version by runign update.packages(checkBuilt = TRUE, ask = FALSE).

Also, be aware that R 4.2 requires RTools42 to be installed in order to compile packages from source so you might want to install that too.

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5

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