Thanks. I actually gave up in the end and tried a manual update....but then ran into another issue!🙄
When I ran the upgrade.php I got this error:
error on line 215 at column 1: Extra content at the end of the document
then I got a 500 error on the back office so I cleared the cache and all seems OK....but how do I know if they really are OK?! Version says it is 1.7.8.1....?