Dismissing CouchDB because it only supports pre-sharding is extremely shortsighted. It takes very little time to replicate from one db with 2 shards to another

Dismissing CouchDB because it only supports pre-sharding is extremely shortsighted. It takes very little time to replicate from one db with 2 shards to another db with 3 shards, even on N nodes. Copying the *.couch files is the absolute wrong way to manage this especially in a production environment when those files will be constantly changing. It is far, far easier to add nodes to a Cloudant/Couch2 cluster, set up realtime replication from db1 -> db2, then once the replication has caught up, at your leisure you switch your database connection in your app.