CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi folks, I'm new here..

I work for a small non-profit that has been using CiviCRM 3 for a couple of years. Most of the data came from a prior database, and it was not cleaned up well at the time, so we have a lot of unnecessary fields, duplicate fields, and legacy data that is no longer needed. A massive cleanup project is in order before we export and import into a new Civi 4 installation.

(Our current website is Drupal 6 with Civi 3. We are doing a major site redesign as we upgrade to Drupal 7/Civi 4, so basically we are doing a separate new installation of 7/4, to run concurrently with our live 6/3 site. First step - get our new Civi 4 database operational).

I'm in the process of cleaning up the fields and sorting what data we need and what we don't, but in this situation I am wondering what the best export process would be, in order to have the cleanest import for the new database.

As I'm relatively new to CiviCRM, what I've garnered so far is that contact, membership and donation information are all separate csv exports, correct? How can I ensure they all connect to the correct contact when importing (does this use the Civi ID)? Should I assign each of them to a separate ID somehow?  Or is there a better way to do this

Many thanks in advance for the help!

Hi Corvi,

CiviCRM is a pretty complicated database on the back end - about 150 tables!  I would definitely recommend creating a copy of your current site, upgrading to D6/Civi 4, then dumping the Civi database and importing it into your D7/Civi 4 install and cleaning up post-import.  It will be MUCH easier to work with an existing database than to try to export, clean, and import into a blank database, especially if you're not using dedicated migration/transformation tools.

I am currently running a site with D6 and Civi 4.3 and it works fine. Tim and I were careful not to break D6 comparability when we were redesigning parts of 4.3 and in some ways it works better than 3.4