We are planning to migrate new documents to a New Document Server. 3 Questions?

1)Should we migrate the old documents on the current Documents server to the new Documents Server as well?

2) If we do not migrate the old documents to the New Server will we still be able to extract/view these documents via Docs Open.

3) Can we run the DOCSNTFS on both the old and the new document server

Note we have aprox 12 million documents which are a few Gig in total.

HELP

Hi,

You shouldn't run into any problems storing documents on multiple servers. We have 33 document servers.

Whether you should migrate the existing documents would depend on the reason that you have a new server. If you don't need to decommission the old one, I'd leave them where they are.

If you do decide to move the documents, I wouldn't recommend using the Storage Manager tool. It will take too long, and sometimes leaves a mess (eg, copies instead of moving some documents).

In the past, I have moved all documents from one server to another, and have merged the documents from multiple servers into one. Each time, our server support people have moved the documents and I've updated the database to point to the new location.

Not sure if you're using MS SQL or Oracle, but the update I run in Oracle is:

update PROFILE
set DOCSERVER_LOC='\\NEWSERVER-SRV1\VOL1'
where DOCSERVER_LOC='\\OLDSERVER-SRV1\VOL1'

I'd recommend testing this on a small scale in a test environment first if you can.

Ours are Novell servers, so I can't help you on the DOCSNTFS question.

Regards,

Larena

1. Shouldn't matter.  If you want to maintain both servers and think that the performance may be better with 2 servers, then I would leave them both.

2. Yes, you will always be able to see the documents, as long as the server is up.

3. Yes, DOCSNTFS will be fine.

I have used Storage Manager before without much issue, except for when you encounter orphaned profiles.  I would recommend checking out Matrix Logic's utility for cleaning up orphaned profiles / files, makes for a cleaner move.  Also, if you use Storage Manager, only good documents get moved, and all the old ~ files and .tmp files don't move to the new server.  If you do just copy the files to the new server, I would recommend some housecleaning first.  I alwasy used Storage Manager because it forced me to clean up the server and database.