Historical Data when migrating to new server

[mohawkTrader]

Hi, quick questions about historical data when migrating to a new machine.

On the old machine, there will be a lot of historical data from running backtests / simulation etc. When moving to the new server, will the old historical data need to be migrated, or will the whole set of data be available on a new server / machine setup?

Basically a few questions:
1. Will there be data loss if we don't migrate the data somehow? If I've been running backtests using tick data for 5 years, and the data provider only gives 1.5 years now (for example?) will the old data be lost when migrating to the new server? (In this example, I would maybe have 6.5 years of tick data on the machine cached.)
2. How much tick back data does NinjaTrader Continuum give - how far back will it go? And is this fixed, or tied to a particular login / first use date?
3. If there would be data loss, how can we migrate, so that backtest can go back further in time than otherwise possible?

Thanks.

[NinjaTrader_Zachary]

Hello mohawkTrader,

Thank you for your inquiry.

1. All NinjaTrader 8 files are saved locally. When you install a new PC, that is an entirely separate installation. When moving to a new PC, you have to use the backup/restore feature to create backup file on the original PC and then restore it on the new PC. In the backup/restore options, you have the option to store historical data in the file so that it can be moved over.

With that said, this will cause the backup file to become quite large and will probably take some time to restore on the second PC.

2. When generally set the expectation that users will have access to around a year of historical tick data when using NinjaTrader Continuum. Some more popular instruments may go quite a bit further back, however. The available historical data is universal and does not depend on the date that the account was opened or logged into the first time.

3. As I mentioned, it's possible to use the backup/restore feature to achieve this or to simply copy the data sub-folders from the Documents/NinjaTrader 8/db folder from one PC to the other manually.

Please let us know if we may assist you further.

[mohawkTrader]

Thanks Zachary.

It looks like my new installation is not pulling as far back as my old installation for tick data, but is for minute data it seems to go as far back. So I will just manually plan to copy the tick folder structure. Do you have a recommendation on doing this? Zip into one file and transfer, or do it piece by piece?

[NinjaTrader_Zachary]

Hello mohawkTrader,

Thank you for your inquiry.

Any tick data saved to your PC can be manually moved to the new folder. This location on the PC would be Documents/NinjaTrader 8/db/tick. I think you would be able to simply put it into zip file and then move it to the other PC using a thumb drive or email. Once you have the file on the new PC, you can unzip it and manually copy and paste to replace the 'tick' folder on the new PC.

[mohawkTrader]

Thank you.

One final question: I see that there is some data in the "cache" folder. And then under certain market hour folders, there are again tick ("TICK") folders:
for example: \NinjaTrader 8\db\cache\CME US Index Futures ETH.Central Standard Time\TICK\ES 03-19

Is this necessary to copy over or how is this data different than the top level "db\tick" folder?

[NinjaTrader_Zachary]

Hello mohawkTrader,

Thank you for your reply.

This is just the chart data cache, which is used by the platform to improve the initial load time of the chart. It is not necessary to transfer this over. All of the actual tick data that you have saved is stored in the db/tick folder.

[mohawkTrader]

Thanks Zachary for the information.

I was able to transfer after a couple attempts. The standard Windows Zip program seemed unable to handle the size of the file (only when unzipping, not zipping or transferring).

Recommend using 7-zip program instead (free here: https://7-zip.org/ ) which worked very well if anyone else runs into the same problem.