I've been searching for a few days for an answer to this.
When you move a list between site collections that has a person/group lookup, the column comes up blank or the data changes in the new site collection. This is because the UserInfo table in the content database for the new site collection is different, and the columns are based on the unique ID.
Is there a way to prepopulate a new site collection on a new content database with the existing UserInfo table so that the person/group lookup field shows correctly when moving sites/lists/etc. into the new collection?
I've been trying to do it with PowerShell but haven't had a lot of success yet. I'd rather not update the fields by hand as we are talking about thousands in some cases. I don't want to touch the database directly either. Hoping someone has come across this before. Thanks.