Thanks for the advice Ruben - it took me a couple of tries to clone the system and not end up with a conjoined twin . . . but I digress . . .
The productive upgrade is now complete and our site is live with 7.7.5. Now to the elephant in the room. I have just one virtual machine (debian) - so my test system shares the PHP library with 5.5.22 deployed.
What sort of weeds might we end up in with an upgrade to PHP 7.4? And did I mention that mySQL is EOL at 5.6.32 . . .
Looking for the voice of experience.
Thanks in advance.
Keith