Active Directory User Deleted, Personal Space Pages Disappeared

[Patrick Chen]

Hello,

We're running Confluence 5.10.1 with a MySQL database. We use a Microsoft Active Directory connection, read only, for our user directory population. 

Recently, a user left the organization and we deleted their account from Active Directory. This seems to have made their Personal Space inaccessible, 404 error when using direct links to pages they had created in their Personal Space. 

Researching the issue, I found this guidance https://confluence.atlassian.com/confkb/personal-space-disappears-after-removing-user-from-ldap-294486514.html and attempted the workaround of creating a local user in Confluence Internal Directory with the same username as the user deleted from Active Directory.

However, this workaround was not successful. After creating a local user with the same username, it was possible to access the homepage of the user's Personal Space and actually see the edits they had put there, but none of the pages that had been created in the user's Personal Space prior were restored or made re-accessible through direct URL links. 

Looking at the MySQL database, I did a search for CONTENTID's that had a SPACEKEY of the user, and it did turn up many results. However, I am not deeply knowledgeable of Confluence database structure so I don't know what I might be able to do to retrieve these pages, if that is still possible through the database. 

Any assistance/guidance for recovering these pages from the user's Personal Space would be greatly appreciated. Thank you. 

[Thomas Deiler · Accepted solution]

Dear @Patrick Chen,

Confluence saves ids for user names. You would have been successful, if the local user have had the same id as the deleted account.

I have no solution for your problem but some thoughts:

• find out the user id of the deleted user and create a news active directory user with this id.
• have a look at the XML backup of the whole site. Modify the ids to an active user (internal) and re import on a second instance. Then export this personal space only and import to main site.
• try the Rest API browser: eventually more  information is dropped with full admin privileges.

So long

Thomas