Migrating Data From Old Installation To New Installation

[m2sys]

I started working at a company recently, and one of my tasks has been to figure out why our SugarCRM is...well, funky. Some users can perform some tasks, others can't, and a large number of functions don't seem to work.

I'm very new to Sugar, and I've tried to self-support myself, but I think my question is just specific enough to require some input from the community.

I've been told the server has been updated/upgraded several times, but each one suffered some odd errors. My thought is that our current problems are because of compounded issues from this, and my plan was to install the latest and greatest on a different server, then import our custom data into it. Kinda like reloading a workstation/server and then copying the personal documents back over.

I've got a full backup of the MySQL database, and from what I can tell the data I'm looking for is in there...but so is other data/settings that I would like to avoid carrying over.

Any got any tips, tricks, links, or suggestions on how to do this the right way? Thanx in advance!!!

[JackPK]

Hi there!

wow, you have quite a task in your hands, but let's get a few things clear at first.

The priority here is to find out which/what are the weird processes, the conditions for those to happen, if its the same with all users, if only happens in certain modules or events, etc, etc, maybe with that you can gather new info and pinpoint the problem(s).

Now, It's good that you have the original DB with all the data you want, but, the migration over a new and shinny CRM install might generate issues due to the differences in the DB's, if your funky sugar has custom modules, scripts, hooks, etc,. then it's very unlikely that just pointing a fresh CRM to the old database is not going to work.

The easiest way to figure out the differences is with the DB itself, a fresh Sugar DB has something like 98 to 100 tables (this is on Community Edition), so, if your old DB has more than that, well, you have to do some manual work and pretty much check table per table.

Other way to approach this is to get all relevant data out of the back-up (accounts, contacts, leads, etc) and import it over the one of your clean CRM, leaving aside the user_preferences, feeds and all the irrelevant tables. You can take your backup, put it on a different DB and get a selective backup from it (you can do this with phpmyadmin), just remember, you NEED to have the same tables with the same fields on the new CRM for this to work.

It'll help to have an idea over what are your issues with the funky one in a more specific way, so if you can share that info it'll be easier to help you.

Greetings and Good luck there

[m2sys]

Thanks for the response, I think I'm going to try the latter option and just import data like clients, leeds, etc...I believe there may have been some custom scripting done, but if that's what is causing all these issues it's not worth carrying over.

The funkyness is such that some functions don't work for similar users...one can search and find info, another can't. I don't see where any group settings would be conflicting/preventing one from accessing it and another from not. Another issue is that we can't update previous clients, but if we make new ones we can update it. I believe there are some other issues that I haven't even seen either, so my level of trust in the old one is none.

The fresh install of sugar has 107 tables, and our previous db has 110, so we're not too far off...I'll do some research but am I correct in that if I were to move the data from one table to another that the info will just show up in the new sugar? I wouldn't have to do some extra "import" task or anything right?

I'll be messing with it over the weekend, might have some more thoughts/questions on Monday. Thanx again and have a great weekend!

[m2sys]

So I was messing with this today...not a great amount of success. I had a new installation of 6.3b5 installed on another virtual machine already, fresh install with nothing more than the initial setup done.

I used a tool (SQLylog) to export/backup our old db, and then used the same tool to restore/import the db into the same db that I had configured for the new installation. It replaced everything, which I wasn't really expecting but figure it would be ok.

However when I bring up the site I now get this message:

Sugar CRM 6.3.0beta5 Files May Only Be Used With A Sugar CRM 6.3.0beta5 Database.

So I guess that means I imported too much? I'm going to bring up another installation (God bless virtual machines!) and try just importing some of the tables, but I was wondering if anyone knew the specific tables I should focus on in regards to just keeping previous custom data...I think I can figure out most.

Maybe a better way to ask that is what tables should I NOT import so that I don't tie up the system like this?

[m2sys]

Much better results this time around...here is what I did:

1. Installed fresh copy of SugarCRM on VM, made note of tables with data in them after a basic installation.

2. Exported all tables not in list above to an sql file

3. Used third-party tool (HeidiSQL in this case) to import/merge the sql file from above into fresh database

4. Exported users table from old install, imported into new install

5. Exported old customizations using the Studio and ended up with a zip file

6. Imported said zip file into new install using Module Loader

7. Ran a Quick Repair and Rebuild from Admin > Repair

That seems to have given me a pretty stable mesh of a new installation with old data...does this process look technically sound? I'm curious to know if there are some extra steps I should do, or if I'm over-complicating things. I really appreciate any thoughts about this, as I plan on presenting it to my superiors sometime next week and I want it to be as solid as possible. Thanx in advance!!!