Migrate from Milvus to Zilliz Cloud

Zilliz Cloud provides a state-of-the-art data infrastructure for optimized search across vector embeddings, making it easy to bring your AI applications to life. As a Milvus user who wants to make the most of this data infrastructure, you are advised to migrate your data to Zilliz Cloud.

This guide walks you through preparing the migration data, performing the migration, and verifying the results.

Prepare migration data

Zilliz Cloud allows data migration from Milvus 0.9.x and later versions. As a promising vector database, there are usually drastic changes between its releases.

In this section, you will learn how to prepare data for migration.

Milvus 2.x Milvus 1.x

To prepare migration data for Milvus 2.x, do as follows:

Download milvus-backup. Always use the latest release.
Create a configs folder side by side with the downloaded binary, and download backup.yaml into the configs folder.

Once the step is done, the structure of your workspace folder should look like this:
```
workspace
├── milvus-backup
└── configs
     └── backup.yaml
```
Customize backup.yaml.

In normal cases, you do not need to customize this file. But before going on, check whether the following configuration items are correct:
- milvus.address
- mivlus.port
- minio.address
- minio.port
- minio.bucketName
- minio.backupBucketName

Create a backup of your Milvus installation.

./milvus-backup --config backup.yaml create -n my_backup

Get the backup file.

./milvus-backup --config backup.yaml get -n my_backup

Check the backup files.
- If you set minio.address and minio.port to an S3 bucket, your backup file are already in the S3 bucket.
- If you set minio.address and minio.port to a Minio bucket, you can download them using Minio Console or the mc client, and upload them to a S3 bucket or save them in a local folder.
  
  To download from Minio Console, log into Minio Console, locate the bucket specified in minio.address, select the files in the bucket, and click Download to download them.
  
  If you prefer the mc client, do as follows:
```
# configure a Minio host
mc alias set my_minio https://<minio_endpoint> <accessKey> <secretKey>

# List the available buckets
mc ls my_minio

# Download a file from the bucket
mc cp --recursive my_minio/<your-bucket-path> <local_dir_path>
```

Migrate data to Zilliz Cloud

Once the migration data is ready, upload it to Zilliz Cloud.

Upload_migration_data

If you have uploaded the prepared migration data to a personal S3 block storage bucket, select Import a folder from S3 and fill in the folder path and authentication credentials.

To upload a local folder to Zilliz Cloud, select Import a local folder and drag the folder to the drop zone. Note that you can upload a local folder of no more than 1 GB to Zilliz Cloud.

Verify the migration results

After the status of the migration job changes from MIGRATING to SUCCESSFUL, the migration process ends.

Verify migration results

Zilliz Cloud only supports AUTO_INDEX, an optimized indexing algorithm, and will automatically index your migrated collection using this algorithm.

After loading the collections, you can use the way of your choice to communicate with them.

Next steps

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