Solved Is it easy to upgrade FreeBSD from beta/rc to release?

In theory, yes. One can probably use freebsd-update. There are, of course, the times when things will go wrong, but it will probably be fairly smooth. Once RELEASE is out, there will be clear instructions on upgrading.

The reason I say in theory is because things can always go wrong, but I would expect it would be pretty smooth. (Trying to remember if I've ever done it that way though, and I don't think I have, so this isn't based on experience) :)
 
I upgraded 4 different platforms (from 10.3 and 11.2) this weekend with no issues.
My USB stick install took a very long time but I have 500+ packages on it and you must rebuild packages at one point.
The USB2 stick only gives me ~20Megabytes/sec.
Regardless it is a time consuming process on any computer.

These were my commands:
freebsd-update upgrade -r 12.0-RC3
freebsd-update install
reboot
freebsd-update install
pkg-static install -f pkg
pkg upgrade -f
reboot
freebsd-update install
 
Don't let them instructions scare you off. They are for a major version upgrade.
For my 12.0-RC1 and 12.0-RC2 machines all I needed was the very first command.
A 12.0-RC3 upgrade to 12.0-RELEASE you won't need to rebuild your packages and it takes very little time at all. Very few files are even modified.
 
Take care when updating from BETA1 to any later release candidate. OpenSSL got updated in the mean time, which could cause problems with packages that haven't been updated yet. So make sure to update your packages too. Other than that it's just as easy as any other freebsd-update(8).
 
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