Marcos Anjos (Nov 06 2025 at 15:50): Marcos Anjos (Nov 06 2025 at 15:50):Good afternoon,
I'm currently working on a task to migrate our Dataverse installation from a VM-based setup to a new Docker-based architecture. I have a question regarding the migration of production data (version 5.12.1), including users, metadata, and files, to the new 6.8 version.
Is there a recommended strategy for backing up and migrating all data between these versions?
I’ve checked the official documentation, which mentions the option of migrating data between repositories, but I’d like to confirm whether that is the only available approach or if there are better methods for this kind of upgrade.
My initial plan is:
Could you advise on the best approach to ensure data integrity and consistency throughout the migration process?
Philip Durbin 🚀 (Nov 06 2025 at 17:37):@Marcos Anjos hi! Unfortunately, you just missed our Containerization Working Group meeting. This would have been a great topic? Would you like us to put it on the agenda for next month? Here's our website: https://ct.gdcc.io
Philip Durbin 🚀 (Nov 06 2025 at 17:38):Meanwhile, we'll try to get you some answers but I'll probably need to lean on others' expertise.
Philip Durbin 🚀 (Nov 06 2025 at 17:38):Generally, I'll say that your plan sound fine! Please let us know if find any bumps in the road!
Oliver Bertuch (Nov 06 2025 at 23:18):Philip Durbin 🚀 said:
Meanwhile, we'll try to get you some answers but I'll probably need to lean on others' expertise.
Just tag @Don Sizemore and me :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes: :wink:
Oliver Bertuch (Nov 06 2025 at 23:19):Welcome @Marcos Anjos and congrats on choosing containers! You're in for a fun joyride :smiling_imp: But don't worry, this is #troubleshooting and we're here to help.
Oliver Bertuch (Nov 06 2025 at 23:20):For the migration, let me highlight some bits I'm currently doing with my own container to container migration from 4.20 to 6.8...
Oliver Bertuch (Nov 06 2025 at 23:21):It's really handy to have a snapshot of the database around for experiments. With containers, you can do most of these experiments on your laptop. For many scenarios it's not necessary to do this on some beefy machine.
Oliver Bertuch (Nov 06 2025 at 23:24):In case you don't want to jump through the releases one by one, which is the only officially supported way of doing upgrades, there's a few ways you can go about this.
Oliver Bertuch (Nov 06 2025 at 23:24):Some have done dumps of the metadata and re-importing in a fresh installation.
Oliver Bertuch (Nov 06 2025 at 23:24):I will not do it like that. Here's what I presented at DCM2025 about my upgrade adventure: http://talks.bertuch.name/dcm2025-upgrade/#/
Oliver Bertuch (Nov 06 2025 at 23:27):The most important bit around the actual data is that you need to be careful how you move it around.
Oliver Bertuch (Nov 06 2025 at 23:28):Depending on the storage system you're using, you need to make sure not to alter the "identifier" of the storage system in the config. Otherwise, you will have to do a data migration in the database to make it available again (the ID is part of the information stored about a file in the database)
Oliver Bertuch (Nov 06 2025 at 23:29):Also, if you plan on moving the data between places, you must make sure the structure is all the same.
Oliver Bertuch (Nov 06 2025 at 23:30):If you are planning to migrate between storage types, things will become a bit more tricky... :see_no_evil: You'll probably be best of with a data migration for it, so you can have the new config in the upgraded instance
Oliver Bertuch (Nov 06 2025 at 23:31):For your experiments you should know that in theory, it is enough to have Dataverse and Postgres running.
Oliver Bertuch (Nov 06 2025 at 23:31):This will at least let you make sure the database is still available. But using a browser, the UI will not show you anything because Solr will be either missing or empty.
Oliver Bertuch (Nov 06 2025 at 23:32):While it is possible to migrate Solr data, I'd advise against doing it. The reason is simple: 6.0 will require a full re-index anyway. So why bother moving that data around just to throw it away.
Oliver Bertuch (Nov 06 2025 at 23:34):Of course, if you are using fulltext indexing in your instance, you will need to either disable it during experiments or make sure that you have a connection to your data. Just a word of caution: this will take a long time depending on your data amount...
Oliver Bertuch (Nov 06 2025 at 23:34):If you have custom metadata schemas, don't forget to apply the necessary changes to the latest schema.xml. Otherwise your re-index is probably going to fail, as Dataverse will not be able to add the metadata from the DB to the Index.
Oliver Bertuch (Nov 06 2025 at 23:36):That's all I have for now!
Last updated: Jan 09 2026 at 14:18 UTC