Move YouTrack to another Server

Whilst in the midst of moving over to another server, one of the challenges facing us was to move our TeamCity and YouTrack instances over as well.

TeamCity couldn’t really have been easier!  The database can easily be backed up and restored through the GUI and worked first time.

YouTrack however is a completely different story!!!!!  Whilst you can easily backup the database, there is no GUI for restoring the backup!  Quite why JetBrains have to this day omitted this functionality from such a great product is completely mystifying!  However, they are resources in their documentation on how to restore a database…….but they don’t work!!!  I won’t go into the details why, but will point to you to the webpage that helped me identify and fix the problem.

Restoring YouTrack Backups

In essence though the process to restore a backup should be (changes from the JetBrains documentation are in bold)….

  1. Logout of YouTrack
  2. Stop the YouTrack service
  3. Remove the existing 00000000000.xd file from your YouTrack database directory (your file name maybe slightly different)
  4. Copy over your backup *.xd files into the database location – mine were called (00000010g00.xd, 00000010o00.xd, 00000011000.xd)
  5. Copy over your blob directory into the existing blob directory
  6. Leave all the other files in place and untouched
  7. Restart the YouTrack service
  8. Login under the root account
  9. You should now see your restored issues

Thanks JetBrains for creating some fantastic products, but please fix your documentation and please supply a GUI to restore a backup just like you have for TeamCity.

Biggest thanks of all though go to Jammer for solving it 🙂

GitHub, YouTrack and TeamCity

After using Subversion, TeamCity and Trac for some time, I decided that it was time to investigate whats new in the work of source control, automated builds, support for agile etc…  After previous work with TeamCity, I was excited to see that JetBrains had come up with their own issue management system called YouTrack that comes complete with all the bell and whistles, Agile, TeamCity integration, backing up, ability of handle multiple repository types… and the list goes on.  I have to say that this is an excellent product and smashes all of the competition out of the water (in my humble opinion).

Following from this it was also time to move to a more future proof source control.  I’ve been using Subversion for some time now and yes it hasn’t missed a beat, but I’ve always found to awkward to setup, maintain, backup etc…  With this in mind I finally moved over to GitHub and it’s been great.  Easy import of the Subversion repositories, easy integration into Visual Studio and the stand-alone GitHub windows app if you need.  Support in both TeamCity and YouTrack is just the icing on the cake 🙂