How do I merge Printers/Users/Databases in PaperCut?

Merging Printers

PaperCut printers are separate records in the database, and merging them or amalgamating them is not currently supported. The primary printer identifier is the servername\printername combination as explained here.

If you’ve migrated to a new server and you’re now finding that you have duplicate printers e.g. oldservername\printer1 and newservername\printer1 showing up in PaperCut under the ‘Printers’ tab, then the best way around that is to:

• Delete the newest entry of the printer (which should be the one with the least amount of job history) - e.g. newservername\printer1
• Rename the old printer name to the new printer name - e.g. rename oldservername\printer1 (which has all the previous printing history) to newservername\printer1
• Now when you print to printer1 it will continue to log to that same record with all the previous history

Note - always a good idea to take a database backup before deleting anything from PaperCut!

If you genuinely have multiple ‘live’ print queues for the same printers (e.g. 2 workstations have the Secondary Server agent installed and have queues pointing to the same printer) then you can also Amalgamate Print Queues by configuring the PaperCut print provider - this is normally only used in specific circumstances, or small office setups.

Merging Users

PaperCut users are separate records in the database, and merging them or amalgamating them is not currently supported. The primary user identifier is the username in this case - GUIDs do not come into the picture, as explained here.

If you’ve renamed users in AD/LDAP and you’re now seeing multiple records for the same user under the ‘Users’ tab in PaperCut, the best way around that is to:

• Delete the user entry with the new name (hopefully very little printing history at this point)
• Rename the old username to the new username
• Now when that user prints it will continue to log against that new username, and will retain all their previous printing history

Note - always a good idea to take a database backup before deleting anything from PaperCut!

There may also be cases where you see multiple users with the same username listed on some reports - this is discussed in the 3rd question on the Report Data FAQs page.

Merging Databases

Merging or amalgamating two separate databases is a very complex task and not something we currently support. For example, on a technical level there are issues such as clashing primary keys, re-indexing, data normalization, conflicting printer names, etc. Technically merging would be possible, but a very large development effort.

The only workaround would be to export user data / job data from one system, and import it into the other system. For example use one of the CSV/Excel reports e.g. Reports → User → User Printing - Logs, and export all of the print job details from one system (that report lists each individual job, who printed it, how many pages, the cost, and other attributes).

You can then use the Import job process or the Batch User Import/Update process to pull all that old job data / user data into the other database.

The end result is that you’ve exported all the job information from database 1, and you’re re-playing that job data back into database 2.

As there are normally thousands of rows of job data, we’d recommend doing all the data manipulation in Excel to create the server command to import the job information - then you can export the Excel sheet as a text file, rename it as a batch file, and run that to process all the jobs as individual commands.