Hopefully you didn't notice, but there was a little hiccup this morning that resulted in a full-blown site migration to a new hosting instance. This then extended to instability later in the day due to 'out of the box' memory leaks that come for free with base image!
For the upgrade, I didn't RTFM closely enough. Although there is reference to the procedure for in-place upgrades on Bitnami Ghost images, hidden more deeply on other pages are a big warning that basically says just start from scratch on a new instance and migrate ... it's safer. Except for the memory problems.
Well, they were correct about that. When the in-place upgrade went pear shaped it left me with MySQL / NPM and God knows what other dependencies completely fubar'd. Even attempting to restore the full application-level backup of the stack resulted in further pooching.
So rather than spend the next 6 hours troubleshooting - I cut my losses and followed the 'deeply hidden' advice. I spun up a new hosting instance, imported the Ghost json export (which I thankfully also took and stored locally) with all the posts and most of the config (sans the custom images, which I did have backed up locally), and was able to get the site back up and running! Or so I thought. About an hour after getting everything finished, I entered a phase of half hourly crashes. Enter another 2 hours of monitoring, troubleshooting, config changing and rebooting. It's now 8:00pm and I think (touch wood) we are back and stable.
Things may still be a bit loosie goosie - I jumped forward about many many releases of Ghost, along with many major and multiple releases of MySQL and Node. There is probably stuff that I locked down or enabled originally that I've forgotten to do this time round, but the basic level of 'sanity' testing seems to be passing at this point in time.
Before you all say 'but why didn't you just roll back to your last daily snapshot?' ... well that would have involved me having already enabled daily snapshots in the first place now wouldn't it.
Yes, they are now enabled.