Restoring SSP Databases from SP1 to SP2 server farm

Question

Has anyone restored Shared Services Databases from SP1 Server Farm to a new SP2 Server farm? I don't want to lose user related information link My Links etc.

I followed the DB attach method as detailed here to restore site content from SP1 to SP2. I am little skeptical about touching the SSP dbs.

Can we overwrite the new SSP databases with the old databases and restore all the information? If you have done this in the past, please feel free to share any important pointers. Thanks in advance.

Update:

I am using the User Replication Engine. It is working fine even for My Links. But it stops after importing a few user profiles. Error logs tell me this:

System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapException: Server was unable to process request. ---> Invalid URL Format: Invalid format for a URL. ---> Invalid URI: The format of the URI could not be determined.
   at System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapHttpClientProtocol.ReadResponse(SoapClientMessage message, WebResponse response, Stream responseStream, Boolean asyncCall)
   at System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapHttpClientProtocol.Invoke(String methodName, Object[] parameters)
   at Microsoft.KNG.ReplicationEngine.Helper.UserProfileWebService.UserProfileService.ModifyUserPropertyByAccountName(String accountName, PropertyData[] newData)
   at Microsoft.KNG.ReplicationEngine.Helper.ReplicationEngineManagerFull.PushUserProfile(String accountName, String nextProfileIndex, PropertyData[] propertyDatasSource)
   at Microsoft.KNG.ReplicationEngine.Helper.ReplicationEngineManagerFull.ReplicateProfile()

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Use the recovery option in the User Profile Replication Engine to imports the user profiles missed in 'Full Replication'. Also check user profile properties you are replicating, there might be some discrepencies!

The Recovery tab permits the administrator to perform full replication for those user profiles failed in full replication. You can also use this tab to perform a full replication for a list of specified users, rather than performing a full replication on all users.

You must have the Manage user profiles permission on the Shared Services Provider (SSP) of the source and destination servers to run the recovery replication operation.

If there are errors during the recovery replication, failed accounts are recorded into a new recovery (.rcv) file. You can then rerun the recovery operation on just those accounts. If a profile fails replicate more than twice, you may need to investigate possible corruption of the profile.

Remember you can also create txt file with the specific set of users you need to replicate.

With the other SSP DBs like Search I prefer to do a full crawl rather then migrate the DBs.

Answer 2

In the past I have just used code to export the relevant settings the reimport into a new SSP. You can use the sharepoint admin toolkit to copy the general user profile properties if both are online, but last time I tried it wasn't doing the mylinks so you need to do that manually plus search config.