Broken Links When Copying Pages from One Space to Another

[Caroline Antoun]

We recently did a redesign of our KM space. We worked on it in a separate design space and tried to migrate it back over when finished. For some reason, the administrator could not migrate over so they made copies of the pages to our OG space. In doing so, all links seemed to have not migrated with the pages -- even if it was just a header anchor link within an article. When you click on them, they redirect you to our Redesign space, and not our OG space we copied the pages into. Anyone experience this? Anyone have any quick solutions on a mass scale? I really don't want to manually update THOUSANDS of links.

[Stavros_Rougas_EasyApps]

@Caroline Antoun use our app Space Content Manager to bulk edit links across your Confluence instance.

Let me know if it works or if any use case that you think we should add. Space Content Manager also has other features like a label manager.

[Caroline Antoun]

@Stavros_Rougas_EasyApps That would still be manually replacing thousands of links one at a time, even if it is a find replace. Is there any way on the back end you can help us out?

[Stavros_Rougas_EasyApps]

@Caroline Antoun it is in bulk, not manual. So if the change if clear it would only take a few minutes.

This might seem counterintuitive but it has a preview. You want to make sure. Look at what currently happened, you didn't have a preview, made a large change and it has created unknown problems.

I know the technical stance is to do it auto magically. But this is not always the best way. I'm writing this based on customer feedback. The preview is key. As a user at times I have seen the preview and then realized I want to adjust something. Plus I'm human, I make mistakes so the preview helps me caught them before I click replace.

[Kris Klima _K15t_]

Hi @Caroline Antoun 

If you make copies of individual pages, the outbound links have no way of knowing what's happening with the pages they're linking to.

The only remedy is to copy all the pages at once - as the content of the entire space is copied in one big chunk, the integrity of the links within that chunk will be preserved.

Confluence has Move and Duplicate features but in the past I always relied on the Copy Page Tree app by Appfire for one-off copying of spaces/sections of spaces. The app does preserve the links in whatever chunk of space you're copying.

For more sophisticated use-cases (such as synchronizing two spaces), I used dedicated apps.

So... I would empty the target space, purge the trash, and try using a method that moves/copies the entire space in one go.

[Caroline Antoun]

Supposedly it was copied over all at once.

[Kris Klima _K15t_]

I'm pretty sure that you can copy all page from one space to another programamatically - there are apps that do just that AND produce results like what you experience.

In other words, there's a difference between copying all pages at once as individual pages and copying them as a single entity (including the relationships between them).

Duplicate method works - I just tested it and copied the content of Space A to Space B with all links resolving perfectly. Links on pages in Space B point to pages in Space B.

I've copied a lot of spaces using the app I mentioned and it never failed. @Stavros_Rougas_EasyApps's app would work too.