Data Retention and Upgrade Strategy for Large Sakai Instance – Request for Input

[aumprarthana]

Dear all,

We are currently running Sakai 20 with over 100,000 sites accumulated over the past 10 years. We are planning to implement a data retention policy and subsequently upgrade our instance to Sakai 23.3, followed by Sakai 25 in August.

Our proposed plan of action is as follows:
1. Backup all database data and associated resource files.
2. Inactivate all sites that have not been accessed or updated in the last 2 years.
3. Archive these inactivated sites.
4. Delete the archived data (both DB and files) physically from the production environment.

We have a couple of specific questions and points for clarification:
• Can the user export a site from Sakai 20 (before archival and deletion) and import it successfully into Sakai 23?
• Do you have any general feedback or suggestions on our retention and upgrade strategy? We are open to improvements and alternate approaches.

We are primarily having performance degradation in the Tests & Quizzes tool in Sakai 20. We are hopeful that this cleanup, combined with the upgrades, will yield significant performance gains.

Looking forward to your comments and recommendations.

[Earle Nietzel]

After you perform your full backup have you thought about simply deleting sites with the "Expunge softly deleted sites" (SoftSiteDeletionJob)?

-earle

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[Charles Severance]

Hi there,

I have a recommendation of a different path.  The Sakai Archive and Import is not well tested in versions of Sakai prior to Sakai-25.

A *lot* of effort went into making sure an export from Sakai-25 and an import into Sakai-25 or later would be high fidelity with no loss of course content.

So while it would be kind of painful (a lot to convert), if this was my Sakai instance.  I would upgrade to 23 and then to 25 and after you are at 25 - do some exporting of courses and importing it into another Sakai instance (i.e. like our nightly servers) and verify that the material came across nicely.

Then and only then I would start to archive and delete course content and empty soft deleted sites.

I would not archive and delete content from any Sakai version before 25 if the content was essential.

In Sakai-25 there are two kinds of exports - one is focused on getting the course content exported and imported (we call this CC+) - the other archive format can include activity data.  The Acrthive+Activity is less well tested in andy version of Sakai.

Others may have more experience than me in the use of the various archive formats on various versions of Sakai.  My goal was to make sure that Sakai 25 could import and export course content with high fidelity.

/Chuck