[rt-users] Merging two instances

[Mark Chappell]

Alex Howells wrote:
> Hi Konstantin,
> 
>> We would like to merge one RT (old one) database in to another RT (new one) without losing any tickets or user data.
>> These both RTs have about the same number of existing tickets (about 400k) and these tickets numbers are conflicting with each other.
>> I've scrolled through the Wiki and the Lists, but failed to locate any data on the matter.
> 
> I'd guess that's because this is something of a corner case!

You've not noticed that periodically you get sysadmins asking "how do I 
merge two RT systems" ?  It's not that uncommon, there have been 2 in 
the last month.

Personally I was able to get people to agree that the important data was 
the ticket data, and as long as the ticket history was there, then they 
could live with merging the live tickets that would end up with 2 ids, 
since one of the subject headers would just be ignored by RT.

At the minute I'm halfway through writing scripts to do the merge... 
Basically dumping the data out into xml, changing user ids to email 
addresses, then reimporting.  But I've hard coded mappings of queue ids, 
and created the new queues on the target system.

I can see why shifting down a version's going to be a pig, but with the 
export/import method it might even work.


Mark
-- 
Mark Chappell
Unix Systems Administrator