[rt-users] binary attachment corruption on database move

[Duncan McEwan]

> Has anyone else experienced corruption of binary attachments when moving
> their RT database from one host to another?

There have been several threads on this subject on the mailing lists.
Search the rt-devel archives for Dec 05 for the subject "mysqldump on
Attachments table (bug #6655)" and the rt-users archives for Jan 06 for
the subject "BUG: MySQL dump of database now attachments dont display"

I posted to both of those threads to say that I'd tried to reproduce the
described problem by dumping and then restoring a test database but had been
unable to.  I was concerned that my testing might be incorrect and that if
I ever had to do a real restore I'd find out the hard way that we did
suffer from the problem :-(

Since that time I have had occasion to dump and restore my complete RT
database containing ~20000 tickets and found no corruption of binary
attachments (word documents or jpgs).

Ruslan did post in the 2nd of the threads mentioned above (message ID
<589c94400601112215i878350cw4064659ea4510a8c at mail.gmail.com>) saying:

> Yep. I think that's because this problem hits only people on MySQL 4.1
> with default server charset UTF-8, but this is small amount of users.
>
> I recommend to use 'latin-1' encoding for RT database in MySQL 4.1.
>
> Also people can convert almost all *TEXT columns to *BLOB, as tests
> shows this helps and  RT works correctly with MySQL with UTF-8 as
> default charset.

The settings for my mysql database are

character_set_client            latin1
character_set_connection        latin1
character_set_database          latin1
character_set_results           latin1
character_set_server            latin1
character_set_system            utf8

Both utf8 and latin-1 are mentioned there and I'm not sure what the various
settings are used for.  But since I don't appear to be affected by the
binary attachments corruption problem I must be following Ruslan's advice!

Duncan