XF 2.2 Attachments from a recent vBulletin import not brought across

[MartyFeldman]

I recently imported another forum into our live XF2.2 forum. The other forum was running vBulletin V4. The import tool worked just great apart from the fact none of the attachments in posts have come across.

When going through the set up for the import the import tool recognised the vBulletin's attachments were stored in a particular file in the httpsdocs folder so I assumed they would come across, but no.

The posts that came across now have a link for the file, expressed now as an XF link ie. .../attachments/12424/ but there's no file with that ID.

I've got hold of the folder from the other site in which the importer tool told me the images/attachments were stored but does anyone have an idea how to map the URL's that have been created by the import to the folder please? The file names in the folder don't have the same ID's obviously.

 

[Mike]

Unfortunately it's quite a bit more complicated than that. The references you're seeing in the post content is likely just us updating the existing code in the post to the XF format. If there's no attachment data actually in XF, it's essentially just a "dumb" link based on the ID number.

Realistically, the only way to bring those attachments across would be to redo the import. This would require restoring to a pre-import backup (or reinstalling a fresh copy of XF if it was an empty install), but this would mean that any content/changes since the import would be lost.

 

[MartyFeldman]

Unfortunately it's quite a bit more complicated than that. The references you're seeing in the post content is likely just us updating the existing code in the post to the XF format. If there's no attachment data actually in XF, it's essentially just a "dumb" link based on the ID number.

Realistically, the only way to bring those attachments across would be to redo the import. This would require restoring to a pre-import backup (or reinstalling a fresh copy of XF if it was an empty install), but this would mean that any content/changes since the import would be lost.

Thanks for that info Mike. Unfortunately, I can't do as suggested as there's far too much content been added since the import, however, for my future references and anyone else reading this in the future how and why would re-doing the import bring the attachments across? I don't recall there being an option to include or exclude the folder the import tool found containing the attachments.

 

[Mike]

Based on your wording, I assumed that the attachments weren't actually accessible at the path you provided to the importer. (If the path isn't valid, we do try to throw an error, but we can't detect issues with individual attachments until we get to them in the import process and then we don't know if individual attachments might be missed because of an issue with the source data, so we generally cannot automatically tell if you gave the correct path.) Setting those files up in a location that's accessible to the importer should allow a re-run to pick them up this time.