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How can I bring documents saved in Blender 2.69, and bring them forward to Blender 3.4, without losing anything?

There are existing questions asking about (for example) materials that get disconnected when upgrading to 2.8. I've experienced that, and more.

My question is not answered by that: I don't know these documents, so I can't manually re-establish (for example) the connections to materials.

If something gets lost in the migration that isn't obvious, I won't be aware of it until things come out wrong later. I want to reliably know that the documents do everything they did in Blender 2.69, when I migrate them for use in Blender 3.4.

Maybe I can export them from Blender 2.69, to some format that will preserve everything? (But then, the foo.blend file saved in Blender 2.69 is not reliably read by Blender 2.8 or later, so what would be better?)

How can I migrate these documents, automatically, to use in Blender 3.4, without fallible manual re-establishing of structure that is already there in the existing documents?

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    $\begingroup$ "How can I bring documents saved in Blender 2.69, and bring them forward to Blender 3.4, without losing anything?" To be blunt you can't. Blender is generally backwards compatible in theory, newer versions always open later files. In practice though a lot has changed, especially between two so distance versions, that it is not always possible to translate one-to-one old features to new. And we are talking within the same file format, exporting to any other exchange format is guaranteed to loose even more. $\endgroup$
    – Duarte Farrajota Ramos ♦
    Commented Oct 2, 2023 at 10:47
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    $\begingroup$ As Duarte said, you can't. The simple thing is, not everything is compatible, some things simply did not exist and especially there is no automated way to convert everything from such an old version to a recent one when you don't know the files as you said and have no idea what there could be probably necessary to be converted. $\endgroup$
    – Gordon Brinkmann
    Commented Oct 2, 2023 at 10:58
  • $\begingroup$ As others have said, you can't. Incidentally the current version of Blender is 3.6.4 LTS (Long Term Support) and version 4 is due out later this year which may well break older Blend files too. $\endgroup$
    – John Eason
    Commented Oct 2, 2023 at 11:26

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Adding to the train of "sorry but you kind of unfortunate". Materials, some modifiers even, some compositing things, they will break and tell you nothing because some things were updated and just will try to convert the best they can, so that's why you'll not see any errors.

In a product I have I had to lose a day just to make it compatible then warn all customers: This is the last version where I'll support it. Update or else.

Workflow:

Open the two instances, b2.6 and b3.6 and append things a step at a time (worlds, materials, geometry etc.) This way you'll have good control on what's breaking and not. Gonna take a long while but you ensure everything will be updated the way it should. In some cases (geometry shouldn't be a problem) you'll have a quick time. Everything else node based, you better just have both instances run side by side and copy your work.

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