Neo4j 5 Online Backup Restore: Is Point-in-Time Recovery Safe Across Major Versions?

Restore goal

I need to restore an online backup taken with neo4j-admin backup into a Neo4j 5.x instance, and the backup was created on an earlier major version. The goal is a point-in-time recovery that preserves node and relationship counts, indexes, and any stored procedures or user-defined functions, without a separate manual data migration step.

Constraints and uncertainty

Backup store files are binary-specific to the Neo4j version that created them, and WAL replay up to the backup timestamp may fail or corrupt the store when the target runs a different major version. Official guidance also notes that deprecated index types can lose compatibility after a cross-version restore, and UDFs compiled for the earlier version may fail until recompiled. It is unclear whether PITR is supported at all across a major version boundary, or whether a dump/load migration is mandatory instead.

Assume Neo4j 5.x as the target and a 4.4+ source with incremental online backups; verification would use neo4j-admin check-consistency and count comparisons against a pre-backup export.

Questions

• Does Neo4j 5 support restoring an online backup from a 4.x store directly, or is neo4j-admin database dump/load the only supported cross-major-version path?
• After a same-version restore, which checks beyond check-consistency confirm indexes and UDFs are fully functional?
• Is re-indexing strictly required after any cross-version restore, or only when deprecated index providers were in use?