Q: How do I recover a deleted Request Tracker ticket ?

• How do I undelete a ticket I accidentally deleted?
• How do I restore a ticket that was deleted unintentionally?

Context

• Request Tracker (RT) 4 on help.mit.edu
• Ticket tracking at MIT

Answer

1. For queue administrators and staff

If you are a queue administrator or staff member working on RT tickets in your queue, and you accidentally deleted one or more tickets, you may be able to undelete them on your own if you still have access to the ticket numbers.

1.1 If you have the ticket numbers of the deleted ticket(s)

This is by far the preferred scenario If you have the ticket numbers, you can undelete tickets yourself (as long as you have permissions to delete them in the first place) if they have not been purged from the system.

• Go to the ticket directly by entering the ticket number in the search box in the upper right corner of the RT screen or...
• Enter the ticket Display URL directly, which looks like this: https://help.mit.edu/Ticket/Display.html?id=1234567 (replace 123456 with the ticket number of your deleted ticket)
• On the ticket display screen, go to the Basics section or tab and change the status of the ticket to Open
• Do this for each ticket you need to undelete

1.2 If you DO NOT have the ticket numbers of the deleted ticket(s)

Send email to tooltime@mit.edu with as much information about the deleted tickets as you can manage. Particularly important is information like:

• The name of the queue the tickets were in
• When (date & time) the tickets were deleted, as close as you can manage
• Who deleted them
• What status you would like the undeleted tickets to be

The RT system administrators may be able to find your deleted tickets given sufficient information, but there's no guarantee.

2. For RT system administrators

For RT system administrators only The below instructions require the ability to log into the RT production server and connect to the Oracle database directly. Not for the faint of heart.

2.1 To find missing deleted tickets

• Log into rt-prod.mit.edu
• Connect to the Oracle database using sqlplus (If you do not know how to do this, you should not be following these instructions)
• Construct a query against the TICKETS table to locate the ticket numbers of the deleted tickets

For example, to find tickets that were deleted by the user othomas after March 1st 2011 in the queue Tooltime you would do something like:

select id, subject FROM tickets WHERE
    status = 'deleted' AND
    queue = 10 AND
    lastupdatedby = 33 AND
    lastupdated > TO_DATE('02/28/2011', 'MM/DD/YYYY')
  ORDER BY lastupdated;

The above will return a list of ticket numbers and subject lines matching the query. The numeric queue ID and user ID can be looked up in the database, but can also be easily looked up via the RT GUI by pulling up the user record and the queue admin page for a specific user or queue, respectively.

2.2 To undelete them

Once you have the ticket numbers, you can pull them up in the RT GUI using the method described under section 1.1 above and change the status to "open".