Quick question for offloading / exporting projects

Jan Bernard Marsman

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Apr 29, 2026, 3:43:19 AMApr 29

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Dear XNAT experts,

What is the best practice for offloading closed projects from XNAT?

Of course in such a way, that I can import the project as well again when needed.

I can archive the files, obviously, but do I need to isolate data from the database alongside with this? Our current storage is piling up, and I would like to move projects to longterm storage..

Many thanks in advance,

Jan-Bernard

akluiber

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Apr 29, 2026, 1:40:29 PMApr 29

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I'm interested in strategies for this as well.

It does seem like a complicated problem for a full export/import process. Aside from the obvious project/subject/session/scan/resource, etc. hierarchy, you might want to retain users, project settings, custom forms, custom datatypes, event service subscriptions, commands, etc, etc. any/all of which might need to be restored/recreated on import, if altered or removed after your export.

I'm guessing the simplest strategy is to just move the project's data off to cold storage, leave the project's shell in place on the filesystem and in XNAT and just remove user access?

Jan Bernard Marsman

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May 7, 2026, 3:34:33 AMMay 7

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thanks for your shared interest akluiber. I would think the same thing should work. create a tar / zip file from the project folder in archive,

Yet I wonder what tables / fields / entries are in the database referring to this data. I think I will try this with a test project.