Deploying Django update to live server
It would be much safer to use a backup of the live data to test it locally
Changes should never be tested in live production.
You should try to at least have a test server that mimics the live one to push to first 

is there anything else I should be aware of?

Depends what versions of apps your changing from and to. Django for example, occasionally introduces changes that aren't backwards compatible
Django is not my main framework, I was hired on contract to update an already existing (live) Django application. Now is time for deployment of my updates to the live server, so I thought I would ask to make sure my process will not cause any problems.
The Django version that was being used was extremely old (2012) and I updated it to one of the recent versions a few months back. This update is the one that worries me most with deployment.
Back in 2012 apparently Django still used South for migrations, now it has been integrated. Since there is some existing data on the live server, I'm concerned that the migration will not play nicely. Any pitfalls I should be aware of regarding this?
As my plan, I'm going to perform a full backup of the existing server/database, then upgrade Django & the dependencies in INSTALLED_APPS to the current version used on my development server, then copy over the files, and perform migration.
Should this process be sufficient? Or is there anything else I should be aware of?