# Custom emojis broken after upgrading from 9.11.6 -\> 10.3.1

**URL:** <https://forum.mattermost.com/t/custom-emojis-broken-after-upgrading-from-9-11-6-10-3-1/22090>\
**Category:** Troubleshooting\
**Created:** [January 7, 2025, 3:54pm UTC](https://forum.mattermost.com/t/custom-emojis-broken-after-upgrading-from-9-11-6-10-3-1/22090 "2025-01-07T15:54:56Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![TorranceYang](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex020/user_avatar/forum.mattermost.com/torranceyang/32/8610_2.png) [@TorranceYang](https://forum.mattermost.com/u/TorranceYang)\
**Post date:** [January 7, 2025, 3:54pm UTC](https://forum.mattermost.com/t/custom-emojis-broken-after-upgrading-from-9-11-6-10-3-1/22090/1 "2025-01-07T15:54:56Z")

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**Summary**  
After upgrading, custom emojis are missing. Requests to https://\<my.server\>/api/v4/emoji//image are 404’ing.

**Steps to reproduce**

- Server running Ubuntu 22.04
- The upgrade was from 9.11.6 → 10.3.1, I likely did not look at the output of [step 7](https://docs.mattermost.com/upgrade/upgrading-mattermost-server.html) of the upgrade guide clearly enough.
- I see little of interest in logs

**Additional details**  
I’m unclear how to restore the image files as I use S3 for file storage, and had thought emojis were stored there.

I have an old server backup with the `emoji` folder preserved with the correct emoji id’s that I’d prefer to restore so as to not need to manually re-upload every emoji (and lose the emoji history if I have to delete the old emojis), but I’m not sure where to restore it to.

I’ve tried restoring the files into `/opt/mattermost/client/emoji/<id>/image` and also `/opt/mattermost/data/emoji/<id>/image`, but it doesn’t seem to fix the issue.

Any help is appreciated!

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![john.oliver](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex020/user_avatar/forum.mattermost.com/john.oliver/32/6436_2.png) [@john.oliver](https://forum.mattermost.com/u/john.oliver)\
**Post date:** [January 7, 2025, 5:39pm UTC](https://forum.mattermost.com/t/custom-emojis-broken-after-upgrading-from-9-11-6-10-3-1/22090/2 "2025-01-07T17:39:26Z")

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I’ll look into this a little.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![TorranceYang](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex020/user_avatar/forum.mattermost.com/torranceyang/32/8610_2.png) [@TorranceYang](https://forum.mattermost.com/u/TorranceYang)\
**Post date:** [January 7, 2025, 7:18pm UTC](https://forum.mattermost.com/t/custom-emojis-broken-after-upgrading-from-9-11-6-10-3-1/22090/3 "2025-01-07T19:18:45Z")

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Hmmm okay I managed to fix this, but I’m not sure how I did it. I suspect something broke in my S3 connection, even though I thought had tested the connection.

Something in the following steps resolved the issue:

1. Changing from S3 storage → Local file storage → back to S3 storage
2. Fiddling with S3 connection parameters until it was green again
3. Purging all caches within System Console
4. Manually restarting the Mattermost service with `sudo systemctl restart mattermost` a couple of times
