I have a SharePoint application in which sites, lists, libraries etc. are created during feature activation (written programmatically) using WSP Builder.
As part of deployment, during deactivation, I have included code to delete all the existing sites, lists, libraries etc. During activation, all the sites, lists, libraries etc. are recreated. The problem with this approach is that, everytime the deployment is done, the contents (e.g. documents that were uploaded in the production environment) gets deleted as part of the deactivation code. One way to handle this is not to delete existing sites, lists etc. during feature deactivation.
Is there another approach to retain the existing content whenever the solution is redeployed?