Hi,
The blank page means that there is a memory or max execution limit on your hosting. You can contact your hosting provider to increase your limits in your php.ini and you won't have the blank page.
But I guess it will result in the same as the install from folder.
But I don't see any reason why the configuration of HikaShop would reset. There is no system to do that in HikaShop.
But what you can do, just to be safe is to copy the table hikashop_config before the update and put it back after the update so that you would get back the configuration that you had no matter what happened.