Migration from 2.6 to 3.3 caused long time deleted variables to reappear

Hello, we’ve been using Octopus 2.6 for a long time. We were goiing to upgrade to 3.x, but this process took a long time, about 4 months (not related to Octopus). Here’s what was the process. We’ve installed Octopus 3.x on a separate server and migrated database from Octopus 2.6. Then in a span of 4 month we periodically repeated migration, but with the ‘-maxage’ flag. During this period we haven’t used Octopus 3.x, just occasional tests.

A week ago we finally upgraded all tentacles to v3 and started using Octopus 3. Of course, before finally switching to Octopus 3 we did a final migration (with maxage flag). But now, after a week, we’ve encountered 2 projects which have some variables, which have been deleted long time ago. So, they are not in 2.6 (this instance hasn’t been shut down yet), but we see them in 3.x. One of such project after deployment has broken production instance because of such variable which we didn’t expect to be there.

We expect that there are more projects with unexpected (long time deleted) variables. The problem is, we have more than 100 projects and we can’t manually verify them all, it will be very difficult to spot variables we don’t expect to see.

What can be done?

p.s

  • we’ve used this instruction for migration
  • we’ve checked audit log and we’re sure that these variables were not added manually be anyone

Hi Dmitry,

Thanks for getting in touch! The migrator, while treating the backup as truth, will only add or overwrite. Unfortunately this means that even though you deleted from your 2.6 instance, the migrator did not know to delete variables that existed in the new instance. While this probably wouldn’t have been a problem over a shorter migration period I can see how it has caused an issue for you.

Unfortunately There is no easy solution here. We think that to help make this easier using the API would be the best method. You could write a script to compare variables between your projects in both instances to at least highlight the difference to you so you know what you need to adjust. Please let me know if you would like us to assist with this.

Regards,
Daniel

Hello Daniel, thanks for the reply. Yes, we were going to use the API to find differences, but we were hoping there could be other way :slight_smile: Ok, thanks!