When and How to refresh a favorite mission?

[Glide]

If I have a favorite mission, and I want to make sure it's using the latest features of OpenBeta, how would I go about that?  My usual approach is to start from scratch with the latest release.  Is there some other way?  Copy and Paste?  Save as template?

[Grimes]

Suppose it depends on the feature, but the general answer is you probably don't need to do anything. If you load into an F-16 mission that was last updated when the F-16 came out you will still have access to the F-16 A2G radar, new weapons that were added to it, etc. In terms of new AI units, well obviously they won't be in old missions, but you can just add them to the existing mission. Mission editor features are the same way, just modify that mission, even if you don't it'll be fine without it. 

The most you need to do is re-save the file, but even then it is far from a requirement. Just look the dates of missions included in the game for various modules, the vast majority are several patches old. The editor has a lot of backward compatibility built into it for loading old mission versions. That said the editor versioning itself doesn't update all that often.