[imp] moving user data from one instance to another

[Andrew Morgan]

On Mon, 22 Sep 2008, Jesse Ross wrote:

> Hello,
>
> A sysadmin here tried to upgrade our Horde/IMP install without an
> appropriate backup strategy.  We're left with a system that can take a
> minute or two to do any transactions.  I'm not at all confident that it's
> even consistent in which files are from which version.
>
> Since our configuration has years of cruft anyways, I am tempted to start
> anew.  I've gotten a new install going on the same machine as the old one,
> and it is plenty responsive.
>
> However, just pulling the plug on the old instance is a problem politically,
> as our users have set their preferences, including the usual complicated
> filters and such, and they would be upset to lose that configuration!
>
> What I'm wondering is whether it's possible to dump the user data from one
> instance of Horde/IMP, and put it into another.  I tried a naive strategy of
> dumping the horde_users and horde_prefs tables from the old database, and
> importing them into the new, but that didn't work (I couldn't see any of my
> user's preferences) so I backed out.  Does anyone have any ideas for how to
> accomplish this?  My apologies if this is covered anywhere - I have read up
> as much as I can, and been watching this list for a few days, but I may have
> missed something.

You really need to figure out what version of Horde, etc, is used on the 
old system.  More specifically, you need to know what "version" your Horde 
database is.  Perhaps your sysadmin upgraded the Horde code tree but 
didn't apply database upgrades?  If you can figure out what state the 
database is in, then you should be able to export/import it to your new 
installation.  Once there, perform any necessary database updates using 
following the instructions in the docs/UPGRADING files for each 
application.

Copying the entire Horde database should work fine, assuming it matches 
the version of Horde code installed on your new server.  Otherwise, you 
will need to determine which database upgrades are requires as I described 
above.

 	Andy