[Digikam-users] Digikam migrating database and images from one NAS to another

[Rei Shinozuka]

I am a Big--no make that Huge--fan of digiKam, the community and the 
amazing work Gilles tirelessly performs on behalf of the user base.

I have a question about migrating a relatively large collection of 
images.  I have approximately 1 TB of images under digiKam on a NAS , 
mounted

     /data/nas1 (filesystem hosted on NAS device nas1)

which I'd like to move to a new device with a new mountpoint to

     /data/nas2 (filesystem hosts on NAS device nas2)

The .digikam SQLite 3.x database is on a local disk, because I last read 
(and this was 5 years ago) that because of file locking protocols you 
shouldn't keep it on a NAS device.  (If possible it would be great to 
keep it on the NAS).

I know I can rsync the image data (album directories, jpg and raw files) 
from nas1 to nas2 and then have digikam rebuild the database, but I'd 
lose the metadata (thumbnails, notes, ratings).  It's not a dealbreaker, 
but with 12 years of history and a terabyte of images it would be nice 
to keep that metadata.

What would be the official recommended method of moving from nas1 to 
nas2 to preserve metadata in the .digikam file?  Or alternatively a 
method to extract from the old .digikam file into the new one?

thanks!

-rei