How to Transplant a Large Archive

During 2011 and 2012 the European Hubble Space Telescope Archive was moved with all its data and services from its old home at ESO near Munich to to its new one at ESA/ESAC(1) near Madrid. The successful move of the active HST and Hubble Legacy Archives took slightly more than a year despite a limited amount of preparation beforehand and a minimum of manpower available for the task. This talk describes the logistics of the move, lessons learned and the strategies which have been employed to make the Hubble archives easy to maintain, self-contained and easily portable between environments with sufficient storage capacity and ubiquitous grid processing power.