Is there no other way around this? Wouldn't you lose all your old transaction data?
You can export the labels beforehand using the option in the wallet menu. It's under wallet > labels > export in the latest electrum. You would export the labels using 2.4 before upgrading to 2.8.3, restoring from seed and the importing the labels.
Alternatively you can use the label sync plugin in 2.4 to upload your encrypted labels to a remote server. Under 2.8.3 you enable it via tools menu > plugins but I'm not sure exactly how it works. Maybe you can figure it out and let us know here?
