I don't have much experience with jforum. I had installed version 2.3.5 and recently updated to 2.4.1.

This is what I did:
1) Backup the complete /jforum directory
2) Drop jforum.war to tomcat's webapps directory (completely overwrites the application)
3) Restore jforum-custom.conf file
4) Restore database/mysql/mysql.properties file
5) Restore jforum/upload directory
6) Execute the sql clauses from upgrade/2.4.0 and upgrade/2.4.1

That was it. Is this a typical update process for a simple install? It seems a bit cumbersome and error-prone.