Post Data Not Migrated When Upgrading From 3.4.9 to IPS4

[Jyosua]

Hey all, does anyone have any idea why, after upgrading to IPS4, none of my post data shows up. Every topic I open looks like this: 

Yet all of the lists of topics and everything else with the site seems to be working. It's literally just the post data that is having problems. The background tasks from the upgrade are still running, but everything I've read on these forums implies that shouldn't result in post data being completely missing.

UPDATE: I found and checked the posts table and it's completely empty. The orig_ibf_posts table has 4.6 million posts, but the new posts table is completely empty. Does anyone know where the SQL script is that migrates this data as part of the install?

[Jyosua]

So I checked the schema and it looks like I was able to manually migrate the table over. There's only the difference in collation (utf8) and two columns were deprecated. There's also a first_post index that seems new, but other than that, the schema for the forum posts seems identical. I suspect the 4.6 million posts we had in our database were what caused this issue. I just hope this is the only problem.

[Stuart Silvester]

6 hours ago, Jyosua said:

So I checked the schema and it looks like I was able to manually migrate the table over. There's only the difference in collation (utf8) and two columns were deprecated. There's also a first_post index that seems new, but other than that, the schema for the forum posts seems identical. I suspect the 4.6 million posts we had in our database were what caused this issue. I just hope this is the only problem.

I would recommend that you submit a ticket instead of trying to fix it yourself, various values are updated in the table as part of the upgrade process.

[Jyosua]

7 hours ago, Stuart Silvester said:

I would recommend that you submit a ticket instead of trying to fix it yourself, various values are updated in the table as part of the upgrade process.

Haha, I did, but support told me to roll everything back and attempt the upgrade again. If I did that, I would lose some data (about 12h and whatever has been posted since I reopened the forums) and would prefer not to do that. I'm also not convinced that the upgrade would handle the 4.6 million posts right this time.

Edit: I want to be clear that I agree with you: this is precisely the situation I would expect help from support for. I work as a software developer myself and I would think that the developers here (I'm not sure if you are a dev, but I would assume probably so) would want to know the circumstance surrounding why the upgrade did not work in my case. If it's a bug, it might happen to someone again and you'd probably want to fix it. Instead, I was told to do the same thing again and expect different results. That kind of response from support has me scratching my head.

That various values in the table are updated as part of the process does not surprise me. I did think that might be the case, but because I can't expect help from someone who intimately knows the upgrade process, I am pretty much forced to try to find the changes and do them manually myself. If I could even have someone point out where in the upgrade scripts this occurs, I could write my own script to do it manually.

[Stuart Silvester]

22 minutes ago, Jyosua said:

Haha, I did, but support told me to roll everything back and attempt the upgrade again. If I did that, I would lose some data (about 12h and whatever has been posted since I reopened the forums) and would prefer not to do that. I'm also not convinced that the upgrade would handle the 4.6 million posts right this time.

Edit: I want to be clear that I agree with you: this is precisely the situation I would expect help from support for. I work as a software developer myself and I would think that the developers here (I'm not sure if you are a dev, but I would assume probably so) would want to know the circumstance surrounding why the upgrade did not work in my case. If it's a bug, it might happen to someone again and you'd probably want to fix it. Instead, I was told to do the same thing again and expect different results. That kind of response from support has me scratching my head.

That various values in the table are updated as part of the process does not surprise me. I did think that might be the case, but because I can't expect help from someone who intimately knows the upgrade process, I am pretty much forced to try to find the changes and do them manually myself. If I could even have someone point out where in the upgrade scripts this occurs, I could write my own script to do it manually.

Typically, if we see an upgrade issue we'll ask you to revert back to the old version then we'll either ask you to try it again or run the upgrade process and look for the issue. We have upgraded sites that have a lot of posts without issue, I would doubt that is the cause of the issue. Obviously, we would need to see the issue occurring to know why it happened and what the appropriate resolution would be.

But yes, the short of it is that we would ask you to restore a backup and you would lose any content that was added since the upgrade.

[Jyosua]

21 minutes ago, Stuart Silvester said:

Typically, if we see an upgrade issue we'll ask you to revert back to the old version then we'll either ask you to try it again or run the upgrade process and look for the issue. We have upgraded sites that have a lot of posts without issue, I would doubt that is the cause of the issue. Obviously, we would need to see the issue occurring to know why it happened and what the appropriate resolution would be.

But yes, the short of it is that we would ask you to restore a backup and you would lose any content that was added since the upgrade.

Hmm, I see where you're coming from. Reproducibility is a good reason if you're trying to track down the bug. Well, what I can do is setup a test server (what I probably should have done to begin with) and run the upgrade again there with a copy of the original database and see if it works. I had a multitude of pre-setup things I had to do to even upgrade. My server OS was too old to upgrade PHP to 5.6, so I had to upgrade my server and all of the associated processes before I could even attempt the upgrade. However, everything, including the forums, appeared to be working prior to the upgrade after doing this, so it would seem like it was definitely the upgrade itself that had an issue. I'm guessing that something timed out during the process, as the upgrade UI drastically changed at one point.