Migration Procedure

This page and the associated documents summarise the procedure we have followed when upgrading the majority of Scratchpad 1.0 sites (running Drupal 6) to Scratchpads 2.0.

The first ~20 sites were done on an ad-hoc basis as we tested the migration process.

Any emails about the migration procedure or the migration process should be sent to support@scratchpads.eu



Inactive Sites - April 2013
Certain sites were flagged as inactive prior to migration if they met the following conditions:
 * 1) No activity for more than 1 year
 * No, very little, or only test content

Maintainers of these sites were given the opportunity to migrate, archive or delete these sites. If we received no replies from the site maintainer(s) then the site was queued for archival.

Pre-migration Email - 22nd March 2013
All site maintainers were contacted to announce the migration process, providing information, instructions and dates. All maintainers had the opportunity to ask questions about migration before the process started.

Migration Form - Late March/Early April 2013
The Scratchpads Support Team identified all biological classifications and categorised all Scratchpad 1.0 sites using the following categories: research domain, scope/focus and taxonomic area.

First Migration Email - April 2013
The majority of sites were successfully cloned to the Scratchpads 2.0 platform without any known technical issues in April 2013. The site maintainers were emailed giving them 20 days to review the site and notify us (via email or the issues queue) of any problems or the need for more reviewing time.

Maintainer Sign-off
Once a maintainer had signed off their site, the URL was updated and their Scratchpad 1.0 site kept live for a minimum of one month. If no additional problems arose during this period a backup of the live Scratchpad 1.0 was made then the site was taken offline.

Second Migration Email - April/May 2013
If a maintainer failed to reply to the first notification email then a second email was sent. This email notified the site maintainer that their site would be automatically migrated if they did not contact us within 7 days.

Automatic Migration Check - May 2013
After not receiving any contact from a site maintainer after the second email, the Support Team reviewed sites to ensure that sites had: We also double-checked all correspondence from maintainers to avoid marking a site as ‘to go live’ erroneously.
 * No obvious issues that might be related to the migration process
 * A well-structured first page without ‘weird’ images or blocks
 * A working classification (if this was present in the old version)