Crowd stores application credentials about itself in the crowd.properties file (name and password). This password is stored in the database via a one-way hash.

If you go to import a given backup into another instance of Crowd you will get invalid application exception's since it is quite possible that the crowd instance you are using has a different password in its crowd.properties file.

the only answer currently is to store this password in the XML export and then set this password in the crowd.properties on import