First I always recommend keeping up the old installation while you’re migrating and not taking it down for at least a week or two (perhaps even longer if you’re paranoid).  That way if you need to, you can always go back.

Here are the steps that I followed:

1. I installed a blank MDID2 to make sure that I had everything I needed on the server to make MDID2 work.  When installing MySQL I made sure that it was the same version as the old server to ensure that MySQL weirdness didn’t interfere with the installation.  For instructions on installing MDID2, I used the MDID wiki’s instructions.  I actually ran the system and had our Visual Resources Curator test things out to see if it worked like he expected a fresh MDID would work (because lets face it, I don’t know nearly as much about the system as he does).
2. Once our Visual Resources Curator gave me the thumbs up I mounted, as a network drive, the directory on the old server that had the MDID2 files and images.  I then copied ALL of the files over to the new directory on the new server.  I then went home for the night…because that’s going to take a while.
3. The next morning go into the config.xml file (found at the root level of mdid2) and change the information in the file so that it’s settings match your new servers configuration.  Most likely all you’ll need to do is change the location of the image files or the username and password of the database, but you should check over the rest of the file just to be safe.
4. Create a mysqldump of the old database using: mysqldump -u mdid2 -p -q mdid2 > mdid2export.sql I then moved the dump over to the new server.  Keep in mind that your MySQL command may be different if:
   • you don’t use passwords
   • have a different MySQL user set to run mdid2
   • your mdid2 user doesn’t have privileges to do this type of command.
5. Once I got the dump onto the new server I opened the dump file in notepad and did a find replace.  In my case on the old server mdid was on the d drive and on the new server it was going to be on the c drive.  So I had notepad go through the file and find all instances of d:\\mdid2\\ and replace it with c:\\mdid2\\.  Again this may be different for you, depending on how your installation is set up.  Once this started I went to go get myself some tea, because this was going to take a bit (although not as long as moving all those files over).
6. Now that the database file has been “fixed” you’re ready to import the database.
   1. Go into MySQL’s commandline and drop the existing mdid2 database: drop database mdid2;
   2. Recreate the mdid2 database: create database mdid2; The reason you just destroyed and recreated the database was because the database has structure and data attached to it based on the work you did in step 1, you want to overwrite that.
   3. import the mysql database by going to Window’s commandline and doing: mysql -u mdid2 -p mdid2 < mdid2export.sql
7. This step is key to avoiding any indexing weirdness you may see.  Trust me, I did these steps multiple times before finally figuring this out (thanks to the mdid listserv).  You’ll need to go in and delete all instances of the _ftindex directory in the image directory.  Go through each and every directory in the mdid2/image directory to get rid of this folder.  If you don’t you’ll find some weirdness in the indexing of data.  Don’t worry this directory will be rebuilt once you start up mdid2.
8. Start up IIS and wait a bit for the full text index to finish up.  If you want, you can log in to your newly migrated MDID2 and click background transactions to see if the indexing process is still running (it should be the second thing in the list).
9. Last but certainly not least, have your Visual Resources Curator check the system over and give their stamp of approval.  Without that, you might as well be dead in the water.

Like I stated above, this is the process that I followed.  Everyone’s systems are set up differently, but hopefully this can act as a guide of sorts to whatever poor schmuck needs to do something similar (ie me…so I don’t forget like I always seem to).

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