What is data migration?
Data Migration is the process of updating Autodesk files and Design Data from a prior release to a newer release.
Do I need to migrate?
It depends. When you upgrade to a new release, Migration of files is not essential; files will be Migrated on their own when you Open and Save a file created in an earlier release (R11 – present) to your current release. Legacy data that is out of production does not require any kind of Migration process.
Concept and Terminology
As customers upgrade from release to release of their Inventor platform this typically also involves migration of CAD files and increasingly CAD data stored in Autodesk Vault document management solutions.
Migration from an Autodesk Vault perspective is twofold, often the change of database versions is referred to as Migration and indeed during the installation process the Autodesk Data Management Console will report that it is “migrating” databases.
This Migration however refers only to the Metadata component of the Vault system where new tables and property definitions are added to the Database set, during this process no managed CAD files are modified, created or touched in any way.
Migration of your CAD data becomes a secondary operation to be completed after the Database Migration, this CAD file Migration is what this article is intended to cover.
As Autodesk Vault allows support for the latest plus 2 previous versions of Inventor with Vault, permitting users to work with legacy Inventor formats, it is important that there is no assumption made about the need to migrate CAD data.
Migrating CAD data to the latest version of your CAD system means that the latest version only of each CAD file in the Vault will have a new version created – in essence every unique CAD record will have a new version, increasing the Filestore size.
In a design environment where Item or File Lifecycle schemes are utilised by either Vault Workgroup, Vault Collaboration or Vault Professional there are a number of additional file access and security considerations which will need to be addressed in order to successfully Migrate the Vaulted data. See Autodesk's document on Migrate released or locked CAD files.
