The question How do I upgrade strawberry perl without wiping \perl\site\lib\ and \perl\site\bin\? was asked in 2011 and it appears Strawberry did throw out any CPAN installs the user did whenever we upgraded to a newer version. Is this still the case? I found a comment from Adam Kennedy which seems related but I'm not sure whether the change was actually made and what its implications are.
Since Strawberry Perl is said to be "100% Open Source" I tried looking for a development site, a place where we could get more details and look at discussions, but I couldn't find any, the strawberryperl.com site is strangely devoid of any information in this regard. Even its Wikipedia page is (slightly) more informative. (Edit: I found http://code.google.com/p/strawberry-perl/ which could be a neat central portal of links, also http://search.cpan.org/~kmx/Perl-Dist-Strawberry-3.012/script/perldist_strawberry is quite informative.)
Also, in case Strawberry still does this, how can I make a local backup copy of the modules? I don't want to have to use CPAN's autobundle and redownload everything from scratch unnecessarily.
Update for future reference: from the comments I gather that since the content in site/lib and site/bin are currently build-dependent in Strawberry Perl, it's necessary to wipe them out and start afresh when installing a new version. This necessity might go away if Strawberry introduces a separate arch-directory to store architecture dependent stuff.
I would just rename C:\strawberry to C:\strawberry-old before installing the new version. Chances are you could just copy modules from the old installation to the new one (not forgetting to look for bits in the "auto" directories). That said, I would probably just reinstall everything from CPAN anyway to get the latest versions. It helps if you have a .bat file that automates this for your favourite additions.