Move repository from 3 drives to 2 larger drives

Without the full knowledge of your environment, I will assume you had 3 disks and each disk had 1 volume only. Taking this as the base information what you can do is either: 

• Partition one of the new disk and have 2 volumes in it to emulate the old environment and leave the other one with a single volume.
  • Assign the same letters that had before
  • Copy the repository information in the same order
• Another solution would be to copy the repository information from 2 disks into 1 and then edit the repository registry located Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\AppRecovery\Core\Repositories

Are these internal drives to the server? It sounds like you are moving over a repository that was extended before, which does add a new complexity as if you copy over your current repo in the method you described the config will look for those separate locations. As Victor said, without the exact knowledge of the drive layout this is an assumption, however were these drives stand alone or did you RAID them? 

Personally, depending on situation of course, I always found the easiest way to migrate a repo was to temporarily setup replication either to a VM or to a temporary machine that I threw RR on just to replicate the data over to it. Once it was sync'ed up, then on the source RR, stop the core service, delete the repo from the registry, fire up the service and 'open the existing repo' (if there are local disks you have to include the step of removing/adding the drives back yes). If you do use the replication method, make sure you either setup the same retention policy on both cores, or disable rollups during the data copy so the data is same. 

Hi Victor,

Thank-you for the response and suggestions.

I considered the partitioning of one of the drives to create 3 "drives" in total to match the existing 2 drives, but hoped there was a way to just migrate it. Nope! :)

I am likely going to go the partitioning route since the 2 smallest drives are 3.27 TB and 3.05 TB. The 3rd drive is an 8TB with only 6 TB used so all of them should fit into the new drives once they are partitioned.

Andy

Hi Phuff,

Yes they are all stand alone internal drives, no RAID, with the Repository expanded across the drives as the repo grew.

Thank-you for the suggestion to migrate the repo. It makes perfect sense, but unfortunately I don't have another computer to replicate to. But one other thing I was wondering is if I could create archives of the protected computers, and then build a new repository and import the archived data?

Andy

That’s exactly what you do. Use a NAS or a USB drive, pause back ups, disable rollups and nightly log truncation, archive everything. When done stop the core service, delete the repo from the registry, remove/replace your drives, fire up the core, create your repo, import the archive. If it’s done in this order you will continue with your incremental chains, if a backup, rollup up, log truncation happens, you will more than likely get a new base image. Be sure to re-enable when complete. Just takes time, but it does work.