Migrating Dataserve to a different server - how to

[Giulia H]

Greetings,

I'm investigating how easy it is to transfer all the data (md & files, published and not) from a Dataverse server to a different Dataverse installation. 

We are planning to use Dataverse and are considering installing it on one of our physical RHEL 6 servers. In the next 5-10 months, most likely, we'll need to move the Dataserve to another server, possibly in the cloud, but not necessarily. 

I have looked at the documentation, where I see the exports are focused on the sharing of data, and I didn't see anything specific about exporting all the data, published and not to upload in another Dataverse. The instructions that I'm looking for are not the type of operation that users might do often, but I wonder if there is a straightforward path to accomplish the task.

If I maintain the directory structure, would it be sufficient to update the tables of the PostgreSQL and update the Solr indexes? If not, what would be the steps?

Many thanks,

Giulia

[Philip Durbin]

Hi Giulia,

I don't think it's especially difficult to move Dataverse from one server to another. Like you said, sysadmins need to know the steps when moving their applications from their data center to the cloud or vice versa. Just yesterday during sprint planning we talked about the need to develop a checklist for moving Harvard Dataverse to the cloud, so you might want to keep an eye on https://github.com/IQSS/dataverse/issues/4309

Disaster recovery could be another reason to move from one server to another. Over at https://github.com/IQSS/dataverse/pull/4271/files (unmerged, as of this writing), we stubbed out a new "Backups" page in the Admin Guide. I think we're done with it for now but if anyone out there would like specific information to be covered, please open a GitHub issue. We want to make your job of running Dataverse easier.

To get at your actual questions, at I high level I believe the filesystem and the PostgreSQL database are the two most critical components to back up or transfer. The data in Solr comes ultimately from PostgreSQL via indexing operations in Dataverse, so you could always re-index (this can take a while) if you need to. For the filesystem, you absolutely want to transfer all the user-uploaded "data files" at `/usr/local/glassfish4/glassfish/domains/domain1/files` or wherever you have your `dataverse.files.directory`* JVM option pointed to. I can imagine you'd also want to back up the main Glassfish config file at `glassfish4/glassfish/domains/domain1/config/domain.xml`. There are probably other files that aren't top of mind for me, but I hope this gets you started. Others are very welcome to chime in!

Thanks,

Phil

* http://guides.dataverse.org/en/4.8.3/installation/config.html#dataverse-files-directory

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Philip Durbin
Software Developer for http://dataverse.org
http://www.iq.harvard.edu/people/philip-durbin