Migration to new host not detecting anything on the PDS

[JunePrimavera]

Hi,

I've been self-hosting a PDS for a while for bluesky, and have recently acquired a new server which I am starting to migrate some of the services across, from my existing one.

I set up a PDS using the installer.sh on the new host system (A virtual machine running Debian 13) and copied the data from the PDS directory to the new one in the virtual machine before starting it up (Result pictured below)

I did not create a new user when prompted (Since I was going to use the same user that I had created previously). Under blocks, the user is present and appears to be stored correctly, under did:plc:fwpghogwjyhllxrjbmfpwzgs. Everything seems to work, but there's just no data associated with the PDS.

It's not clear what's going on here to me, as the PDS is working just fine on the original host machine:

Despite using the same files/data.

I've tried changing the permissions of the files, but to no avail. I'm not sure if there's something host-specific I should be worried about? The directory names appear to be encrypted (Or at least something along those lines, it's definitely not plain text) when viewed through my smb share or through virtiofs, but I just put them in a zip file first and all was okay, not sure what is happening there, but it is probably entirely unrelated.

As for the files on my pds on the original host, there are far fewer files and this feels like it could be related, but I am unsure. The PDS I am migrating the data from isn't set up using install.sh, rather docker compose;

services:
  pds:
    container_name: pds
    image: ghcr.io/bluesky-social/pds:0.4
    restart: unless-stopped
    volumes:
      - ./pds:/opt/pds
    ports:
      - '3002:3000'
    env_file:
      - ./pds/pds.env

Apologies if I am missing something obvious here.

[axfelix]

Hi! I don't know exactly how you deployed your PDS, but I'm getting the sense that you're probably spending more time in the filesystem directly than we recommend for a migration. I'd recommend referring to https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds/blob/main/ACCOUNT_MIGRATION.md, and also using https://pdsmoover.com/moover if possible to simplify this further. Let me know if we can help make that clearer or if you're still having issues!

[JunePrimavera]

Hi @axfelix , sorry for the late response. I've had a look through the links you've provided, but this is to do with account migration, rather than moving a PDS from one host to another.

Since the PDS would be under the same domain name, I can't run more than one at the same time, at least, not without giving it a different subdomain - Would it be best to simply set up another subdomain for one PDS, set up the new one and just migrate the account like you normally would when migrating to a completely new PDS?

My hope would be that it'd be as simple as taking the data from the original PDS and copying over its files to the new install, but that doesn't appear to be the case (Unless I'm doing something wrong).

[axfelix]

Yes, I would actually recommend setting up a separate subdomain and performing the migration that way! Let me know if you encounter any issues going this route and if there's anything we can make clearer. Sorry for the confusion!