upgrade from postgres 7.3.2

Hi all,

I am new to postgres. The current version of postgres we are using is 7.3.2.

I am looking to upgrade to 7.4.x. Is the upgrade necessary? If so, which is the most stable version to upgrade to?

We have more than 300 tables with lot of data to be backed up and restored. It would be nice if someone could give the steps to upgrade from 7.3.2 to one of the latest stable version.

Here is the output from select version();

                           version                          

-------------------------------------------------------------

 PostgreSQL 7.3.2 on i686-pc-linux-gnu, compiled by GCC 2.96

(1 row)

Thanks,

Saranya