What is the best way to recreate tickets from a disaster recovery using email history?

[Kent Chiu]

Hi,

What is the best way to recreate missing tickets for a disaster recovery?

We just had a massive storage outage and lost 2 months worth of tickets. The only records we have are the JIRA email notification history for creation and update.

There are around 5000+ email notification from JIRA for the creation and update. It is necessary for us to recreate the missing tickets. It will take a very long time to recreate them by extracting information from the JIRA email notification.  I can export the email into a CVS format file and do a Bulk import into JIRA. However, we have to massage the CVS file to map out the JIRA fields which will take a long time.

Are there scripts that available to handle this kind of conversion from Email to JIRA ticket creation?

Thank you for your help.

Thanks,

Kent

[Jack Brickey]

Man that is horrible! So it is clear all backups are gone. The only option you has as you pointed out would be to locate all create and updates and right a parser to produce the CSV (s). If you don’t need every update you could locate the last email for each but you will loose history. I don’t know of any tool to help with this but possibly others do. You might also consider reaching out to Atlassian partners and contract services to assist as they might make shorter work of it. 

Best of luck!

[Kent Chiu]

Hi Jack,

Thanks for your reply. It was so unfortunate that the last good backup was from 2 months ago. It is a lesson for us that a good reliable backup is extremely important and a high priority for all JIRA users.

It is doable to recreate it from the email, it is just painstakingly time consuminging. I am hoping that someone has the experience and could share their solution.

[Craig Castle-Mead]

Are the emails still in a mailbox (imap accessible?). If so, use whatever language you’re familiar with (or can get a contractor in to help) and it should be relatively trivial to loop through each email, extract the relevant content (sender, subject, body, attachments) and then either use the JIRA API to create the issues, or, put the content in to your import CSV format.

if the files are available on disc, you could use text manipulation tools available in Linux, loop through each file, extract the contents based off regular expressions (or there could even be Linux utilities that do the hard work of extracting content from email files for you) and then again, load in to JIRA via API or CSV

Good luck!

CCM

[Kent Chiu]

Thank you Craig for your response.  We are currently trying to collect all the JIRA email notification and try to compose the CSV format file and will use it to import into JIRA. It is quite difficult to parse the information from the body of the email.  I think we got an idea on how to recreate the tickets using the Bulk import feature. It will take quite some time to retrieve the proper information and map it to the CSV file.