Please forgive my ignorance. I jailbroke my Ipad a few years ago and I've been out of the community since then. My current version is 4.12. I would like to upgrade my iOS in order to run a few apps that require a newer version of iOS.

My Ipad is first gen. I have a number of different SHSH blobs saved on Cydia.

Should I upgrade to the most recent version of iOS or try to upgrade to an older version like 5.01?

Is there currently a way to upgrade the version without losing my jailbreak? A few years ago it was not possible but perhaps things have changed since then.

I use iClarified for my jailbreak tutorials. I don't recall how to upgrade to an iOS version that is not the current version.

When I jailbroke in the past all of my jailbroken apps would be lost. How do I go about making sure that my jailbroken apps are saved/restored in the process?