Manual database migration

Hi
Unfortunately, my raspberry pi running zigbee2mqtt suddenly stopped working. While I can not recover the sd card I do have in fact a recent copy of the database.db. After setting up a new pi I copied the database.db (and corresponding configuration.yaml) but no devices are added/recognise. After repairing a new device (Xiaomi button) I inspected the new database entry and they seem to differ between the old and the new entry. I think this might be due to a newer version of zigbee2mqtt (I do not remember which version initially was used)?
Is there another way to migrate the database? Or can I add in devices directly by hand? As I prefer not not to remove all already installed buttons.

Thanks

Also interested in this as I plan to deliberately pair and test on one machine and move configuration to another “hot” machine when ready.