# Media Migration ## Overview
When a VMS is migrated from aging hardware to a modern platform, many organizations allow video on the old recorders to β€œage out” and then power them down. However, there are many times when **migrating the media itself**β€”along with cameras, roles, and viewsβ€”**offers lower risk, lower cost, and greater business value.** Media Database migration is an involved, multi-step process, especially when there are multiple source and destination recorders. It is supported by XPort 5.0 onwards and aims to facilitate use cases such as the following: * πŸ”₯ **Imminent hardware failure** – Legacy SANs or NVRs show SMART errors or near warranty expiration, so waiting months for retention to lapse risks losing evidence. * πŸ•°οΈ **Ultra-long retention needs** – Evidence, compliance, or regulated footage must be kept for years; maintaining two systems wastes licenses, power, and rack space. * πŸ“¦ **Modest archive size** – If the source database isn’t large, integrating it into the new storage simplifies search, backup, and billing. * πŸ“ˆ **Analytics & AI rollouts – Upcoming LPR, slip-and-fall, or retail analytics require months of historical** data for training and baselining. * 🌐 **Data-center exits** – When a lease ends, migrating media enables shutdowns without breaching retention policies. * 🏒 **Mergers & acquisitions –** Combining archives provides a unified search interface for security, compliance, and investigations, reducing silo hopping. ## Feature summary: 1. **Universal payload support** – migrate video, audio, metadata, and I/O signals together in one operation. 2. **Built-in bandwidth throttling** – limit transfer rates to protect production traffic during migration. 3. **Granular scope control** – choose to transfer only recent footage or the entire archive. 4. **Migration-time estimator** – receive a realistic timeline based on footage volume, disk speeds, and network speed. 5. **Flexible fan-in / fan-out** – map any combination of source recorders to destinations for versatile transfers.
Explore subsequent sections to perform media migration. --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter: ``` GET https://docs.vega25.com/xport/user-manual/upgrade-everything-workflow/step-by-step-user-guide/media-migration.md?ask= ``` The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.