Restoring from backup to an empty instance (users not imported)

[Janeen Kedzierski]

We are doing a restore from a backup .xml file into an empty jira instance and not all users are added to jira - we have users that are in project user roles and they get removed since they are not registered. what am I doing wrong on the import ?

When we do a restore from an .xml file not all the users are restored. They are not registered and they seem to just disapear.

When developers are not registered they are removed from the user and developer roles and if they where project leads there is no access to there project until they are registered.

Is there a way to get all the users registered in jira before the restore is done? or is this situation unsolvable since

the database is cleaned out before the import is done.

[Adam Saint-Prix]

I have issues and projects that are owned by users that are not in the user list for jira. This is causing issues for project not haveing the same people in the developers list and the project user list.

I'm not really clear on what you mean here. Can you register those users in the XML backup before you try the import? Or are you saying they are there before the import and afterwards they are not?

If it's the latter and you want to search the data directly, you can probably just do a text search or regex search to find the username you want. I would only do this if the XML backup is small. Maybe 10-20MB tops. After that I find searches take forever and start locking up the machine. I like Notepad++, vi or TextWrangler, TextMate for those sorts of searches - but I guess this depends on what OS you are using.

Note: I'm picking 20MB as an arbitrary number; you should pick what you're comfortable with. Personally, I prefer SQL queries to searching XML files.

If your data set is larger than 10-20MB, then it may be more efficient to run the query on the underlying database directly. You could query the user table entries to verify if the users are "registered" as you say.

If you are using the eval HSQLDB you can actually run queries on that to check for registered users. Regardless of database type (MySQL, Postgres, SQL Server etc. or eval like HSQLDB) you can just run a select on the cwd_user table to check for usernames (obviously you'll need to edit the syntax, but just as an example:

mysql> select user_name, active, last_name, first_name from cwd_user where user_name like 'juser%';

+---------------+--------+-----------+------------+
| user_name     | active | last_name | first_name |
+---------------+--------+-----------+------------+
| administrator |      1 |      Vader     |     Darth       |
| juser         |      1 |  User         |    Jedi        |

*Note: Earlier versions of JIRA, I think prior to 4.1, use the userbase table to store user info, so if you're on an older version that doesn't use User Directories and relies on osuser.xml, you'll need to search a different table (userbase).

The db approach I think is better and easier, but those are some options.

[Adam Saint-Prix]

To be clear, the XML restore will completely overwrite any content in the target instance. If you are restoring from an XML backup that configuration should be completely restored in the new target instance. This includes any project configuration and project role setups and user information.

Regarding the users that are not registered, what do you mean they aren't registered? Were they registered in the backup file and now they are not? That sounds unlikely. Are you sure you are importing the correct backup file?

Can you have someone else test the import (support maybe?) to see if they experience the same issue?

That doesn't sound right.

[Janeen Kedzierski]

I have imported the xml file several times in different jira instances and still there are users that are not registered. How do i check that they are registered in the xml file. I tried to look to find a line that might be the registration line but no luck. I find it odd that some users are registered and not others.

I mean registered as users in the jira system. I have issues and projects that are owned by users that are not in the user list for jira. This is causing issues for project not haveing the same people in the developers list and the project user list.

Janeen