Symptoms

Crowd reports the following error when restoring an XML backup;

2009-01-30 16:03:44,175 http-8095-Processor25 INFO [util.persistence.hibernate.ConfigurableLocalSessionFactoryBean] Creating database schema for Hibernate SessionFactory
2009-01-30 16:03:44,222 http-8095-Processor25 ERROR [console.action.setup.Import] Error importing XML data org.dom4j.DocumentException:
Invalid byte 2 of 4-byte UTF-8 sequence.  Nested exception: Invalid byte 2 of 4-byte UTF-8 sequence.
 at org.dom4j.io.SAXReader.read(SAXReader.java:358)

Cause

The File Encoding is not set to UTF-8

Resolution

This is a known issue with Crowd version 1.5 and below. If you're seeing this issue, please see this workaround on how to perform a new backup with the proper file encoding.

If you no longer have access to your old Crowd instance, and only have the XML backup, you can edit the backup using XML Notepad to indicate which lines contain characters that must be corrected before a restore can succeed.