Handle changes to the database in production

Hello guys, I'm making a big website using PayloadCMS as backend. I'm not very far from finishing it, and I wanted to ask you a question about database changes.

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So far whenever I want to make changes to the database (for example I change a field name from

to

), Payload will stop considering all the

named fields and from now on will only account for

. This makes all the data stored as

not accessible to the website. The best solution I found so far is to make a script that will change

to

on all the old records.

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Is there some other method to do this? (My real question is if Payload can handle this process differently without me doing so much manual work, or it's fine to do the changes using a script)