Migrating data from 0.88 to a new instance with 1.2.18

[maglimar]

Hi All,
I have to do a big upgrade of Cacti from the old 0.88a version and I have also to do a big update from Debian 7 to Debian 10. For that reason I was thinking to do create a new virtual machine and making a complete new fresh installation, and at the end to migrate the data from the old version to the new one.
What do you think is the right approach? Is it difficult to migrate the data from the old version?

Thanks in advance for your support.

BR
Marco

[GGA]

Hello Marco, old topic but still relevant. I am thinking about the same. How can I move my data from my old system to my new one.
I know we had cases where we copied old rrd to new rrd. As a sample, we moved a device from one switchport to an other and so we were able to copy also its data.
But that was on the same cacti-machine, same condition, same release.
What if we move the a new release, a new machine?
Well I could just try and copy some samples and see what happens.
rrdinfo could help, but it doesn't exist on my old cacti.

[TheWitness]

Generally what I do is:

1) Backup the database on node 1.
2) Install Cacti 1.2.21++ on node 2.
3) Restore the backup from node 1 onto node 2
4) Force the upgrade of the old database to the new Cacti version using the upgrade_database.php script
5) If you have plugins, get them updated
6) Get the latest spine installed and updated
7) Once data collection on the new node is clean rsync the RRDfiles from node 1 to node 2.

[GGA]

Thank you TheWitness for your step-by-step procedure. The important information to me is, I can copy all rrdfiles at the end.
I'm not sure if a database-backup is a way I would like to do. I had to many strange effects on my old cacti-setup.
Some times I saw corrupted trees only after moving leaves within the tree.
I have a lot of aggregate graphs based on the aggregate plugin.
A lot of old stuff that seems not to work anymore. So for me a new start is the only clean way.
Maybe there is a way to write a script for moving old rrds to the new server and overwrite the new rrd a the correct place. But this depends on how important old data is.

[TheWitness]

You will have to write it. Aggregate Graphs will be upgraded properly depending on your aggregate version. Other plugins may not be supported.