how to protect appleworks6 when upgrading to el capitain

AppleWorks support ended in 2007. OS 10.6 was the last OS that supported AppleWorks.

Run Mac OS X Server 10.6 inside a product such as VirtualBox or Parallels Desktop.

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Don't upgrade your existing system. Install El Cap on an external drive instead. You can clone your existing system to the external, and then install the El Cap upgrade onto the clone, or you can do a clean installation of El Cap on the external. That way you can evaluate El Cap without trashing your current working system. Whatever you do, have a full, working backup before you upgrade. I prefer Carbon Copy Cloner for making system backups.

Why do you feel that you have to upgrade? How much installed RAM do you have? If you have only 4GB, you may be dissatisfied with your MBP's performance using El Capitan. If you really like Snow Leopard, you may find a lot to dislike about El Cap.

For additional help with AppleWorks solutions, post a query at the AppleWorks forum here at Apple Support Communities:

AppleWorks

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Check out this thread. It took me about 6 months to totally move from AppleWorks to iWork. For most of my documents it was quite simple, though I did need to do a little cleanup with documents that had graphics included. However some of my documents took advantage of the ability to mix spreadsheet and word processing in one document. These I had to recreate since there’s no similar function in iWork. You can get more info in the thread I linked to.

Other options already mentioned here are also doable but will cost a bit - 10.6 server in virtualization for example.

dwb wrote:

Check out this thread.

An update to that thread is that LibreOffice will now open Appleworks database files as a spreadsheet.

The data can then be saved as TEXT CSV and imported into a newly construction database in FileMaker Pro or other database:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7452959?answerId=29775847022#29775847022