Dev-Pri looked at this in our November meeting and decided to close it. We recommend updating the repository-importer plugin as suggests, which would be helpful for a number of institutions (including my own).

For catastrophic failures, regular MySQL backups are probably the way to go.

For merging ASpaces, this tool from HM can be very handy. I think that adopting and extending it to support the things it currently doesn't (like locations) would be very useful, particularly if the transfer of resources between repositories was made more robust.

I do like the idea of being about to smoosh together two ArchivesSpace sites easily and completely. I know there's the HM tool that comes close, but having a plugin or tool to easily combine two existing sites into one would be super useful. Though it's likely most people would only do it once, I would think there's more than a few people who would want to do that.

I think this would be more of a smoosh/migrate/combine thing, and less of a backup thing, since just using mysqldump for the backups is probably fine. I'm thinking something almost like the tools to migrate out of AT & Archon, but for going from ArchivesSpace to ArchivesSpace.