I'm a paid user with version 17 installed. I've been a Spartan user for at least a decade, I can't work without it. I had to reinstall version 17 a few years ago; in the process I lost 7 nearly full pages of research materials and reference quotes that I use daily. I had to reconstruct all of them on the new installation. I had a vague notion that they might be on the AppData storage but was too busy to learn how to retrieve them. I'm sure they are long gone by now.
I don't want to have to go through those headaches again. Please instruct me on how to safely update (do I need to make a backup etc?) to the most recent version. Thank you.