Migrating Your Voyager Index

You can migrate an existing Voyager index to another Voyager instance while preserving the original index, configuration and security settings. Migrating indexes can be useful for administrators of Voyager to make upgrades go smoothly. This is especially useful when migrating indexes to a new server. You can not only migrate admin settings, but also thumbnails and preview images from your previous index.  

There are three methods for migrating an index:

Use Snapshots to save a copy of the index to disk and import the index later.

• To use these tools, go to Manage Voyager > Index > Snapshots 
  
  

• Follow the steps in these articles:

• Creating an Index Snapshot

• Importing an Index Snapshot

To preserve thumbnail and metadata information in addition to your search index, you can directly copy the Data folder from an older Voyager instance to a newer one. 

1. Make a copy of the Data folder from the Voyager installation directory.
2. Once the new instance has been installed, stop all Voyager processes. Copy the Data folder into the new install directory.
3. Restart Voyager.  
4. The old Voyager index will be now be read by the new Voyager instance.

NOTE: Since this method requires creating a copy of an older Data folder (which contains the index, as well as the Meta and Config folders), it can take up significant disk space and also be time-consuming (depending on the size of the index). However, this method ensures that all user settings are migrated from an old to the new Voyager instance.

This option is useful when users want to retain all their previously configured settings including their core index, thumbnails, preview images, saved searches etc. 

Things to consider while using this method: 

• Ensure that there is enough free space to copy over the older Data folder (less than 70% disk utilization). It could otherwise cause a "java.lang.OutOfmemoryError."
• You can move portions of the .\data folder to a NAS device where you have more disk space. You will need to keep the index files (relatively small) on your C:\ in order to maintain best search performance. See here for additional information.
• When migrating the Data folder to a new machine, do not copy over the license.dex file, as it could lock the instance out due to conflicting machine IDs.
• if your discovery.dex file has relative paths (from the previous instance) that the new Voyager machine does not recognize, users could see missing locations on their Locations page. 

Use this method to preserve location and user settings without migrating the Search index, thumbnails or metadata etc. 

1. Make a copy of the Config folder from the Voyager installation directory.
2. Once the new instance has been installed, stop all Voyager processes.
3. Copy the Config folder into the new install directory.
4. Restart Voyager.  
5. The new instance of Voyager should reflect the older instance's Location and Security settings. 

NOTE: With this method, previously indexed locations will be reflected in the Locations page of the new instance. in addition, user settings, passwords and groups will also get carried over. However, because the index doesn't get carried over, users will initially see a blank search page, and will have to scan all the locations in the new instance to populate their Search page. 

 Things to consider while using this method: 

• When migrating the Data folder to a new machine, do not copy over the license.dex file, as it could lock the instance out due to conflicting machine IDs.
• if your discovery.dex file has relative paths (from the previous instance) that the new Voyager machine does not recognize, users could see missing locations on their Locations page. 

See Also

In addition to using the methods listed above, users can also use one of the following to preserve their index settings: 

• Configuring Index Replication
• Federated Searches