upgrade kura installation without losing configuration

I'm currently running Kura 1.1.1 on a beagle bone black running debian linux with some custom packages and some altered configuration.

I would like to upgrade to the latest Kura release without losing the configuration and packages.

How do you upgrade while maintaining the state of a kura installation?

AFAIK there is not an official way to do this yet.
You can backup the following files and include them again after upgrading:

• data/snapshots/snapshot_14xxx.xml this is the file containing your bundles' configuration. Most recent changes have a higher timestamp.
• kura/dpa.properties this files contains a list of deployed Deployment Packages, installed through web-ui or DEPLOY-V1 cloudlet.
• *.dp the actual Deployment Packages installed.
• If you manually added jars or edited start scripts, you must copy/edit them again

Depending on how you upgrade, you may or may not have the previous installation deleted. Shell script installer for example changes /opt/eclipse/kura/ symlink to the version it installs, without deleting the old one.