The beauty of hosting with MantisHub is that you will never need to worry about the retention, accessibility or integrity of the data stored in your MantisHub issue tracking system.
All the advantages of cloud hosting are at your fingertips. Like logging into your system from any place or any machine securely. No need to worry about the security of your servers or disaster recovery. MantisHub hosting is robust, reliable, and secure, with daily backups of your data.
With all this convenience, you still have access to export and extract your data in several ways. Whether you need to integrate it into another system, play around with some numbers, produce reports or simply for peace of mind, you’re covered with these features.
Download all MantisHub data
Any administrators within the system can access the backup option from the Manage page. From here they can generate a full backup of your MantisHub to get a snapshot of the database at any point in time. When you generate a backup, two zip files will be available for download :
- “database and configuration” file which contains a MySQL dump of your database and your configuration files.
- “attachments” file containing all attachments uploaded to your system.
You can upload the db.sql file to a local MySQL service for verification and access it from your favorite database viewer and analytics tools.
With the attachments, extract the zip files to get access to the attachment files. The attachment file names will be encoded and will have to be correlated with the database to get the file meta-data.
Here’s the KB article for more information on generating and downloading backups.
As MantisHub already create a full daily backup of your data you will probably never need to use it but it may be what you need to tick some boxes on your corporate policies checklist for security or data retention.
Printing Reports
The filters within the My View page can allow you to display a specific set or subset or your issues. If you’re not yet familiar with how to use filters, check out this article and get to it as it will save you a heap of time trying to find the information you need.
Once you have grabbed the issues you are interested in, you have the option to Print Reports.
To print it, just click the button. You can print all the listed issues or further cull the list and just display those selected. There are two options to print to; to a Microsoft Word document or HTML and it will include the Issues Details view of your issues.
Step by step instructions can be found in this KB article.
Exporting to CSV or Excel
There is also the option provided to export issue details to CSV or Microsoft Excel also from the View Issues page. This means you can do a whole lot more with your data because you can plug these into other systems to manipulate how you want. For example, MantisHub has some in-built reporting but if you’re looking for specific statistics on your issues this option can allow you to generate graphs and tables using Excel or some other application that allows CSV import.
It’s important to note that you have to define what issue fields and information you want to be included in the export. This needs to be configured in the Managing Columns section. This can be configured at a project level by the administrator [Manage – Manage Configuration – Manage Columns] but users can override this within their personal preferences [My Account – Manage Columns]. All fields that can be exported (including your custom created fields) are listed in the All Available section. Have a read about it in the Managing Columns KB article. And help with exporting can be found in this article :).
If you have Mantis Time Tracking feature turned on, you can also export this information to Excel or CSV to get some statistics on time your team spent working on issues. This is available through the Time Tracking page that is added to the menu when you enable Mantis time tracking.
API
For the technically savvy you can access information from your MantisHub through our API. This does require programming knowledge and can be a super powerful tool for pulling specific information from your system and manipulating it as needed. You can retrieve details of your projects, configuration, users, issues and filters. And the API is continually expanding so keep an eye out. To read more about MantisHub API options check out this KB article.
So if you’re looking for that flexibility while still getting the convenience of secure, reliable service, there’s your data on a silver platter :).
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