Lotus Notes migration to Ubuntu 12.10 64bit

Having made the first steps in securing the W530 (see previous posts) and having set up further security & compliance related components as dictated by corporate policy, I was ready to start migrate my data from the old t400 thinkpad to the new box. The most critical part of the data to be migrated is Lotus Notes data. I am proficient with the operating system and all other software components I have on my old laptop but I am not a Lotus Notes experts at all, it is mostly a black box for me and a potential source of trouble challenges. The old laptop is running Ubuntu 10.04 32bit while I set up the new one with Ubuntu 12.10 64bit as mentioned in previous posts.

Backing up Lotus Noted Data

To clarify the scope, I was migrating from my data from a Lotus Notes 8.5.2 environment on Ubuntu 32bit to a 8.5.3 one on 64bit. Additionally, I also decided to clean the cruft accumulated over the last 7 years... I checked for defunct workspace icons and any obsolete local replicas and removed those. Then sorted all email in my inbox to their appropriate folders (usually, I do this while waiting for connecting flights at airports) and archived all emails from before 2013. I also changes the archive settings to save any new items to a new archive file. After cleaning up, I was ready to migrate my data.

First and foremost, do know what you have to migrate. I wanted to migrate the minimum required amount of settings but not less. Lotus Notes stores data in the proprietary Network Storage Facility format, these files have nsf os NSF extension. These files are self contained document-oriented databases storing semi structured data - the application logic and view definitions are also incorporated. There are some files like cache.nsf or log.nsf that do not carry valuable information, others will have to be backed up.

My mail file is just a normal nsf file, however it is encrypted with the private key stored in my ID file. It is a good practice to keep a backup of your ID file anyway, I have seen people believe that remembering their Lotus Notes password would be enough to recover a corrupt or deleted ID file...

Workspace definitions and icons are stored in the file desktop8.ndk, which also needs to be backed up. I also made sure to backup my custom signatures.

There are some settings stored in the eclipse workspace, but I did not migrate any of those. I was trying hard to start with an clean as possible environment and ended up with using the following command to create the backup on the old machine:

# backup all databases except log.nsf, the id file, desktop file and signatures
find ~/lotus/notes \( -iname '*.nsf' -o -iname '*.id' \
  -o -iname '*.htm' -o -iname 'desktop8.ndk' \) \
  -not -iname 'log.nsf' -print0 | tar cspzf \
/media/SAMSUNG/backup/t400-20130103/lotus_notes_data-sparse.tar.gz --null -T -

Installation and migration

On the W530, before restoring the files, I installed Lotus Notes and let it create the data directory, and initialize the ~/lotus/notes/data folder with default files. To do so, I started it, waited until the splash screen disappears and the first application window appears asking me inputs for initial setup. At this very first screen, I pressed cancel to abort and exit. I made sure all Lotus Notes processes terminated - one can use the "Lotus Notes Zap" utility for this.

Then I extracted the data and issues some more tweaks using the commands listed below. Other minor customization like setting the theme and default font was done from within the graphical interface, but nothing worth to document...

cd ~ # make sure we are in the right directory
tar xzf /media/tibi/SAMSUNG/backup/t400-20130103/lotus_notes_data-sparse.tar.gz
# start Lotus Notes... and choose "office network" as current location, look around, then exit.

chmod -x ~/lotus/notes/data/*.gif # just some cosmetics...
# I use English language, but more with my preferred date format
cat <<EOF >> ~/lotus/notes/data/notes.ini
DateOrder=YMD
ClockType=24_HOUR
DateSeparator=-
TimeSeparator=:
EOF
# restart notes and verify the date format used in your inbox.

The result is a fully functional install with all the data migrated, however it is lacking a few more tweaks to improve the visual appearance of native widgets. These tweaks are going to be covered in the next post.