How to port data-only volumes from one host to another?

Question

As described in the Docker documentation on Working with Volumes there is the concept of so-called data-only containers, which provide a volume that can be mounted

Answer 1

I'll add another recent tool here from IBM which is actually made for the volume migration from one container host to another. This is a currently on-going project. So, you may find a different version with additional features in future.

Cargo was developed to migrate containers from one host to another host along with their data with minimal downtime. Cargo uses data federation capabilities of union filesystem to create a unified view of data (mainly the root file system) across the source and target hosts. This allows Cargo to start up a container almost immediately (within milliseconds) on the target host as the data from source root file system gets copied to target hosts either on-demand (using a copy-on-write (COW) partition) or lazily in the background (using rsync).

Important points are: - a centralized server handles the migration process

The link to the project is given here:

https://github.com/nadgowdas/cargo