Importing a large vB4.2.2 board with many attachments

[Tom McIntyre]

Our site has over 288,000 attachments and over 1 ,000,000 posts.
I do not anticipate any problems with the forums, but the attachments are in the file system in the standard distributed tree structure and I have run into problems just trying to copy them to a new server.
One of the primary motives for moving from vB is to be able to use responsive design so that our tablet and phone users have the full features of the message board. To our users that means being able to drag and drop images into posts as well as have the site adapt to their device.
What difficulties should I be ready to handle when undertaking this project?
Is there professional support available to assist in the conversion and upgrade?
Our CMS on the vB site is under used and could probably be closed and the content merged.
Our Blog is not heavily used but has a significant amount of content that would be worthwhile preserving.
We have VaultWiki installed with quite a bit of content which would need to be moved to the XenForo version of VaultWiki.
I am open to suggestions on how to go about this effort and which add ons will be useful to us.

 

[Paul B]

I have run into problems just trying to copy them to a new server.

What problems are you having?
In general, a server move shouldn't pose any particular issues.

Is there professional support available to assist in the conversion and upgrade?

As a company we don't provide import services but there are third parties who do.
Many of them advertise here: https://xenforo.com/community/forums/third-party-services-offers.42/

CMS and blog content would require third party add-ons (and importers) if you wish to preserve it, as there are no equivalents in XF.

Likewise for VaultWiki - I believe there's an add-on available for that.

 

[Tom McIntyre]

I am trying to buy Xenforo with the Media Gallery, Resource Manager and Advanced Search. Our current vB site is using DigitalPoints implementation of Sphinx search engine. I do not completely understand the requirement for Elastic Search. Do I need to get and install Elastic Search? there seem to be many layers to Elastic Search.

Do I need to buy the service. Will I need to take the training? ... It would help if there were some description of just what is involved with the Advanced Search.

 

[Paul B]

ES is typically required for sites with in excess of 1 million posts, although there are other advantages over standard MySQL search, which smaller sites can also take advantage of.

If you want to use ES, you would need to purchase the ES add-on and then separately install elasticsearch on the server - this typically can't be done with shared hosting.

https://www.elastic.co/