I just did an upgrade from the calendar and date module of which calendar needed to move from 6.x-2.x-dev to 6.x-2.4 version which seemed a pitb exercise. I hope I missed some skills :-p

The following command was not working

drush upc calendar-6.x-2.4

So what I did was download the latest version offsite. Then diff the module trees.

cd /tmp
drush dl calendar-6.x-2.4
cd /my-site/sites/all/modules/calendar
cp -r /tmp/calendar/* ./

For a site on my VM I needed an svn sync and the backup files on my developer site.

I initially didn't want to install backup_migrate module. This was partly due to my arcane workflow which is of course by hand and unfamiliarity with back_migrate module.

So this is what I deviced

test_site@serverVM:~$ crontab -l
# m h dom mon dow  command
*/7 * * * * wget -O - -q -t 1 http://test-site.com/cron.php
*/5 * * * * /home/test_site/svn-up 2>&1 > /home/test_site/svn-up.log
* */1 * * * /home/test_site/ant-backup 2>&1 > /home/test_site/ant-backup.log