Wow - what happened here I am using Joomla 1.5.23, then I look up and Joomla is all of a sudden at 2.5.1...Should I upgrade?

After much Googling and reading of posts it appears that upgrading may not be quite the most straigtforward thing...however I need the new user functionality at "BeanBox Bike Rental"...so here goes.

First things first - all the blogs that I read say that before any uprade it is essential to be on the most up to date stable version of 1.5, which is 1.5.25...Hmm, need to get from 1.5.23 to 1.5.25.

After doing a full backup - Full backup for me is running Akeeba and using ftp to download the backup file from the server to my home computer...What you say - don't have Akeeba...this should be installed immediately. I also copy all the root Joomla files to my computer and export the SQL database and save the file. Maybe slightly overkill, but too much backup cannot be a bad thing. See my article for manual backup of Joomla.

After being unable to find documentation or an upgrade package for 1.5.23 I noticed that some users have used the "Admin tools" extention with success. So I installed Admin tools 2.2.0 and after a few clicks was up and running with 1.5.25 - Wonderful extension !!

At this stage I went through the full backup process again before contemplating getting to 2.5?