Copying an index from one copy of a database to another

Folks,

We have a database with 1.2 billion records (about 300GB not
including indices).

The data is static but indices are build and dropped as needed.
Because the indexing is time consuming, we would like to maintain
two separate copies of the database: one for indexing and one for
production.

The question is:

Is there a way to copy the index from one copy of the database
to another copy without copying all of the data?

Right now, we are copying the entire data directory, which is
a bit painful.

--Martin

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Martin Weinberg Phone: (413) 545-3821
Dept. of Physics and Astronomy FAX: (413) 545-2117/0648
530 Graduate Research Tower
University of Massachusetts
Amherst, MA 01003-4525