Migrating Individual Sites to Another Server

[jclacherty]

Hi,

Is there a way to migrate individual sites (share) to another server?  I'm setting up an Alfresco 3.2r server that will be used by three separate entities, at some point it may grow big enough they may want to have their own server (or VM) so I'd need to pull out those sites and put them on a new server.  Is this possible?

Cheers,
Justin.

[jpotts]

I've never tried this. It could be exciting!

AFAIK, Share puts stuff in three places:

• User-created data for a given "tool" goes in a tool-specific folder (like "DocumentLibrary") under a site-specific folder in the "Sites" folder under Company Home.


• Share is a Surf app and Surf apps have "model objects" that includes things like Pages and Components. Share creates Page and Component model objects on-the-fly as you configure your Share site. Those objects have to get persisted somewhere and for Share, that somewhere is an AVM store. If you go to your node browser you can see this in avm://sitestore. Drill into that and you'll see a bunch of objects with names that include the site's "URL name".


• I *think* you can do Groups with Share sites now (3.2?) so a given Share site may have related groups that would need to be migrated. Related to that are user profiles. Share user profiles contain extended information that you don't see when you edit a user in Explorer. So you'd probably want that data moved over too, although it isn't tied to a specific site.

Of those, the first and third are relatively easy to migrate. It's the second one that could be hairy. It's certainly not as simple as a drag-and-drop or ACP export/import. Maybe you could use the AVM API to get to those objects and then call web scripts on the target box to post the data on the destination? Just thinking out loud here.

Jeff

[jclacherty]

Cool.  So while there's no tool to do it at the moment, it may be possible to write one in the future (assuming someone hasn't already done it by then) to do it.

Probably end up being easier to restore the entire thing to three separate machines then delete the content no longer required.  But where's the fun in that

[tommorris]

Hi there,

Regarding the second migration task, I normally migrate data between AVMs across diferent installations by simply dragging-and-dropping folders from one of the VFS (virtual file system) interfaces (e.g. FTP or CIFS) on to my local file-system. From there I drag-and-drop it into the VFS of the target machine.

I'm not sure that's all you need to do, but by node-browsing around 'avm://sitestore' I noticed that none of the objects seem to have custom aspects with custom properties that would make the migration difficult.

I just pointed my FTP client at '/AVM/sitestore/HEAD/DATA/alfresco/site-data' and copied the contents out without difficulties.

It may be worth trying.

Tom

[arganus]

I can get at the data for step two via ftp (as descibed above) - so how do I migrate the items in steps 1 and 3?

[joe_l3]

Hi all,
for step 1 and step 3, I used the import-export tool

Export Company_Home/Sites

Export -user $ALF_USER -pwd $ALF_PASSWD -s workspace://SpacesStore/ -path /app:company_home/st:sites -verbose -overwrite sites‍

Export Users and Groups

Export -user $ALF_USER -pwd $ALF_PASSWD -s user://alfrescoUserStore/ -path /sys:system -verbose -overwrite system
Export -user $ALF_USER -pwd $ALF_PASSWD -s workspace://SpacesStore/ -path /sys:system -verbose -overwrite system_in_workspace‍‍

Note that for users and groups, I exported the entire node "system" from "workspace://SpacesStore/" and "user://alfrescoUserStore/" (see http://forums.alfresco.com/en/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=26721)
Now suppose that I miss the step 2 to complete the migration process. However, I also wanted to test the import in a new system. The result was this:
- on Alfresco Explorer everything seems to work properly (users, groups, sites and so on…)
- on Share apparently everything seems to work. Search engine displays the list of sites correctly. But when I click on them, I always return to the "user dashboard" instead of "site dashboard". So I don't see the components Wiki, Blog, Document Library and so on…
I am currently studying the issue.

[jhosmel3]

I've never tried this. It could be exciting