Migrating from vb 4

[Mikkel-T]

Hi,
I started migrating from vb4, but running the converter is extremely slow.

I started migrating our 9 million members, and this process took 10 days.
While extremely slow, I thought this was okay, now I just need to put the forums in read-only mode, and the tool can finish up migrating the users, messages and so on, that was created in those 2 weeks.

I contacted support assistance, but to my big surprise this is not a feature. I have to run the migration all in one go, and keep the original boards in a read-only state while doing so (if I wanted to make sure everything got converted).

This doesn't work for me, as we have many posts and threads being written everyday, and the forums are an important tool for quite many stakeholders including volunteers, marketing teams, bug reports, and so on.

In addition to this, putting the forums in a "read-only" mode is not possible.
We run an online game, and everytime a new user signs up, they are also created on the forums (and as you might have guessed, this happens quite often). So I would like to keep the amount of users we are not able to migrate, to a minimum.

Do any of you have a suggestion for how to deal with this? - Shutting down forums for 3 weeks while this migration is on-going is not an option.

[Bluto]

I could be totally wrong on this, but....

1.  I would shut everything down.

2.  Export a backup on the VB site.

3.  Upload the backup to a blazing fast server - Digital Ocean maxed out droplet.

4.  Do all the conversions to IPB.

5.  Export a backup of the new IPB site.

6.  Upload it to your server.

7.  Start everything back up.

I would think a faster server would equal faster conversion.  Of course, you have to figure in the time to do all the transfers.  It could take a lot of time to upload and download your data depending on how large it is.

Not sure if IPB ever got around to completing the IPB to IPB merge board converter which might be able to help you in this case.  If they got around to building the merge boards converter (like in older 3.4 version), then you could put up a temp board, convert VB to IPB offline and then merge your temp board into the main board.  Or merge the converted board into the temp board - creating the new board.

Hope this helps.