igeek Jon

Thanks Josh - I've been trawling through the external data sources (there are a lot of files) and they're all looking good, however, I've never been too concerned about them. Were there any other ares that you could think of that might raise a concern when switching hardware?

Yes, I'm aware of that and it's a good reminder / lesson for anyone else. However, unless I'm missing something, I can't see how this will help in this situation as the external datas sources have already been configured via Manage External Data Source in all of the files many years before I got my hands on them My request was less to do with configuring a new version of FMS and more to do with transferring the files to a new server (with superior hardware) and running the same FMS version (ie v11), then going about testing it. At this stage, changes to the files need to be kept to an absolute minimum so I'm looking for any suggestions that will aid the transfer whilst making minimal changes to the database files. Thanks for your input of course and sorry if I missed your point.

Hi - just wondering what measures people might take in the following scenario. Multiple FM7 files are currently hosted on old hardware (running FMS11) and everything needs to be upgraded. A new server is being prepped running FMS19 but there are a number of legacy plugins which almost certainly won't play well with FM19, so before the plugins are tested and replaced, new hardware is being setup running FMS11. We need to move all of the files from the old hardware to the new hardware and test it in a safe environment which minimises the risk to the live databases. Once this has been checked out, then we can switch off the old server and start using the new hardware. Initial plans are to verify that all external data sources are set to being local to the test copies of the DB files so that there's no risk of contaminating the data between live and test DB files. Secondly, scripts will be trawled through for any Send Mail steps so that emails are not sent via the test DBs. Thirdly, all relevant script steps need to be checked to see that there aren't any hardcoded file paths to the live server (if that's even possible). The live and test servers run multiple schedule scripts (though the test server has these currently disabled until all of the above is verified) - the idea being to test everything out, then run the server scheduled scripts and see if we get expected (ie healthy) results. Can you think of any areas where additional caution should be taken, items I might be missing? All help appreciated :)