The Situation: Our 2008 MSSQL server is old and rapidly running out of drive space. We have a new 2016 server ready, we just need to move a 40 TB database from the old server to the new one. The DB, of course, has dozens of tables, but the EVENTS table is the one that is eating up all the space. The EVENTS table is partitioned by month, and the partitions are spread out on multiple logical drives (we kept adding disks until we physically ran out of space).
The Question: How do we move this massive database from the old server to the new server with a minimal amount of down time? Outside of not upsetting the users, the table grows by about 15 GB per day, so every day spent offline creates a significant backlog of records that needs to be worked through.
The backup/restore method doesn't really seem feasible, as we have no place to store the backup.
Is it possible to move a partition at a time? (My research so far leads me to believe it is not)
We are a bit overwhelmed by the task, and any advice would be appreciated.
