I have lost data when moving Jira Items from one project to another, how do I recover the data?

[Tony Parkes MOD]

When moving Jira items from one project to another I have lost data in the transition, even though fields were mapped accurately and were configured the same on both projects before the MOVE. how do I recover the lost data?

[Trudy Claspill · Accepted solution]

Hello @Tony Parkes MOD 

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

What are the project type of the source project and the destination project? Get that information by clicking the ... button next to each project's name in the panel on the left.

If the source is a Team Managed project, were the fields created a local custom fields in that specific project, or were you reusing Global custom fields?

What are the types of fields missing data? Text fields? List fields? User fields?

Did you map just the field names, or did you drill into mapping the specific field values?

[Tony Parkes MOD]

Hi Trudy - Thank you for your answer;

The Jira setup is Team Managed, and Yes the fields were Custom fields I had set up in both source and target project configuration. Unlike an Import from CSV, as I Moved the issues in Bulk Transfer from one project to another the data from the Custom Fields was not offered up to be mapped by the function, only the source and target project name and Issue Type. 

[Amanda Culver · Accepted solution]

Let's call them SOURCE and TARGET projects.

Firstly, I'd confirm that you've truly lost field contents

To confirm :

1. export the work items from the new project,

2. project = TARGET AND key >= TARGET-123 and key <= TARGET-567 

3. inspect the xls. 
   1. Apply filters to the row containing the field names.
   2. Find the column(s) with the field names you believe are lost. 
   3. Filter removing blanks

If there are work items listed, the field contents aren't lost, they're just not visible.

If they are, the only recovery process is using a previous export that included the data (when the work items were still in SOURCE project). 

However, it's significantly more likely that the data is still present, it's just not on the screens in the TARGET project.

[Tony Parkes MOD]

Hi Amanda - That is an excellent suggestion!

I have done this and I am so pleased to report I have found the missing data!! Yay!

There appear to be several Custom fields with the same label so after trawling through all the exported columns I found it hidden in one of the many duplicate labelled columns. I can now add that back to the migrated data in the Target project where t was meant to be, manually, 

Thank you very much.

Tony