I'm getting an "unsupported field encountered: binary" error when trying to restore my JIRA backup?

[Geoff Wilson]

(SOLVED BELOW.   I just wanted the community to be aware as it took me a full day in support to find out).

In JIRA, I was trying to Restore one of my Backups and I was getting the error:

java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Unsupported field encountered: binary

None of my backups from the past 2 weeks were able to be imported with Restore Backups as I kept seeing this error. 

[Geoff Wilson]

After talking to Atlassian Support for a full day to try to get them to find out what values in my backup XMLs are causing problems, they found this XPORTER-681 issue where the add-on was setting a column value as Binary which JIRA does not support. 

I tried to replace binary with string but that failed, so eventually I just removed all of my Xporter table configurations from the activeobjects.XML backup file, re-zipped it up, and the restore worked fine. 

However, note that Xporter will not work immediately after this as I had to remove all of those table values, so I'm just reinstalling it.

Allegedly, from that bug report it looks like it was fixed in 4.0.4 but I was still using 4.0.4, so maybe I'm reading it wrong and it's fixed in the more current release.

[Rui Rodrigues]

Hi Geoff,

Is it fixed now?

Thanks.

Rui.

[Radek Karaffa]

Big thanks for your investigation. Today I lost half-day for this problem. 

I have Xporter 4.1.1, upgrade not fixed this bug, problematic field was not removed.After remove Xporter tables from backup JIRA restored fine. 

I was try install Xporter back, config it, add templates and create a few exports. After that, none "binary" exists in Xporter tables in new backup of Jira.

[Jean-François FORGET]

Hi,

I get something similar. I want to import project from JIRA cloud backup to JIRA server but i get a non explicit error like this:

There was a problem with the SAX parsing of the file 'my_jira_backup_file.zip' when performing a project import.
org.xml.sax.SAXException: Unrecognised AO Data Type
        at com.atlassian.jira.imports.project.ao.handler.ChainedAoSaxHandler.endNestedElement(ChainedAoSaxHandler.java:231)
        at com.atlassian.jira.imports.project.ao.handler.ChainedAoSaxHandler.endElement(ChainedAoSaxHandler.java:195)
        at com.atlassian.jira.imports.project.ao.handler.ChainedAoSaxHandler.endElement(ChainedAoSaxHandler.java:148)
etc...

So i dedide to install a fresh test JIRA server instance to last version (7.2.4) to try restoring my cloud backup. Then i got the same message as you describe.

I just removed the line with <binary>binary information</binary> located at the end of the activeobjects.xml file in the JIRA cloud backup.

It works and i can import a project from the JIRA cloud backup to my runing JIRA server instance!

Hope it help...

[Yusuf Tran]

this no longer works unfortunately, after deleting those <binary> lines (2) I get the following:

There was a problem restoring ActiveObjects data for the <unknown plugin> plugin. Importing table AO_3C6513_XPORTER_SECURITY failed. Please check the log for details.