Migrate data from InfluxDB 1.2 to InfluxDB 1.8

Hi,

We have been using InfluxDB since 2017 and have three servers each with their own independent InfluxDB installation. Each installation has about 250-300GB of data in InfluxDB.

Largely due to inertia on our part, those three servers are still running InfluxDB 1.2 on Ubuntu Linux 16.04.

We now have to move the servers to new hardware and I am thinking that the best approach will be to do a fresh install, updating the operating system and other software to more current versions.

I have a tool which will migrate the data from the old InfluxDB to the new, by querying the old server and writing to the new. However it’s going to take a fair while to move that much data.

If we make a backup of the existing InfluxDB 1.2 database using the influxdb backup command, can we restore that backup into InfluxDB 1.8?

(I am sticking with InfluxDB 1.8 for now as I do not want to rework our processes for Flux 2.0 language.)

Thanks,

Jeremy Begg
Suntrix Monitoring Pty Ltd.

What I’m sure of I that the process has been reworked in v1.5, but the old backups are still supported and are now called legacy backups

I had a look between the docs regarding v1.2 and v1.8 ad I don’t see any substantial difference.
I’ve also looked at the release notes history and didn’t see any major changes about backups apart from the fact that what you are looking for is now called “legacy” backup/restore.

What you ask for should be possible, by just making a standard backup in v1.2 and a legacy restore in v1.8
The easiest way to find it out is to simply try it, even with a small portion of data.