Well, the instructions also said that alternatively you can just plug in the power cable and forget about the buttons. Which is what I did.

And if you do a backup before upgrading the upgrade process will recognize the backup and suggest a restore, if you follow up it'll add all your repositories and getting applications back is as simple as walking through the program manager. Those applications I had installed manually I keep in a directory on one of the SD cards, so re-installing those was easy too.