Locating AIP files on a server

[Lauren Goodley]

All,

We recently had staff changes which led to our locally hosted Archivematica instance not getting moved over to a new/upgraded server. I don't have access to Archivematica and I'm not sure it can be "stood up" long enough to download AIPs and store them on the server I have access to. 

I have some AIP identifiers, but I don't know exactly where the AIPs are stored (the directory path). The IT staff have no experience with Archivematica so I'm looking here for assistance with what questions to ask them and get my words in order first. My thoughts are:

1. Can we bring up Archivematica on the old server for me to download the AIPs (I feel like this is a no or very labor intensive, if the old server is no longer active. But I don't know!)

2. Is there any way to know where the AIPs are stored? Search for a UID across all servers, and they'll all be in that directory? 

Any thoughts most welcome!

Lauren

[Matt Deschaine]

I think the answer might depend a lot on your local installation, and how the migration was handled. Your IT staff should know what they migrated, or at least know if they moved your AIP Storage to a new server. If your organization has been using Archivematica for any amount of time it's probably a significant enough amount of storage they'd take notice.

If your old server is still available, I'd say the "easiest" way to figure it out would be to look in the Storage Service, which would give you file paths to your AIP storage location. From that point you could dig into the file system and do any migration from there using more efficient tools than downloading from the UI. You would probably also want to copy the MCP and Storage service databases. If you end up wanting to rebuild Archivematica and retain that old data those make it a lot easier.

Depending on your infrastructure and your level of access, If you have the AIP UUIDs you should be able to do some sleuthing to find out if they were moved to the new server. Default Archivematica stores AIP in a directory tree based on that UUID in 4 character increments, but you should be able to search for the whole UUID and work your way back to the main AIP storage location.