If you have an existing system but you are installing OpenVPMS on a new machine, you essentially go through the steps for a new install, but instead of creating a new openpms database, you restore your existing one, and then upgrade that to the new release.
First you need to use mysqldump to take a backup of the database on the old machine (see Upgrade|Preparation).
Now you can follow the New Installation steps until you get to the dataload step. Instead of using the dataload utility, you use the mysql utility to restore your backup onto the new machine. This is done using the command:
> mysql -u admin -p openvpms < openvpms.sql
where admin is the name of your root user and openvpms.sql is the dump from the old machine.
You should continue with the Web Application and Open Office installation steps.
To complete the process, we need to upgrade the installation on the new machine, so we simply use the steps to Upgrade an Existing Installation.