Migrating projects, what happens to issues referencing users who have not been migrated?

[Julia Steak]

I am attempting to migrate several projects from one JIRA instance to another. I am planning to migrate users manually, and therefore only want to migrate users who are currently active on our source instance. 

Has anyone done this before? Is it important what order you do this in -- import of projects before adding users, or vice versa? What happens to issues or projects that have some reference to a user that is missing? Are the issues still migrated as they should be?

Some of these projects are being migrated for archival purposes, so it is very likely that some of the users who aren't migrated over have issues/projects associated with them. I'd like to know if I'll run into any problems with the migration because certain users to not exist in my target instance. 

[Ryan Fish · Accepted solution]

@Julia Steak

User creation would go first because of issue, reporting and dashboard dependencies.
You will get errors if you create projects and migrate issues before user creation.

Concerns Atlassian talks about regarding missing/ deleted/ not added users:

• reported or assigned issues
• commented issues
• The filters and dashboards of a user will be deleted when the user is deleted, even if the filters or dashboards are shared with other users

Hope this helps

[Julia Steak]

Thank you Ryan!