Migrating projects to another Jira instance
These steps are for migrating projects between different instances of Jira Server and Data Center and require a 3rd party app Project Configurator for Jira. If you're migrating from Server to Cloud, see Jira Server to Cloud migration resources.
Let's assume you have two instances of Jira – a source, and a target. In the source instance, you have several projects and users working on these projects. You'd like to transfer the projects to the target instance along with the configuration, issues, and attachments. Ideally, after the migration, your users wouldn't even notice the change. Here are a couple of possible scenarios:
- Expanding a small project – the source instance is operated by a group or department within a bigger organization. A project is started there as an experiment. After some time, however, this project has expanded to other groups, and you want to move it to the target, corporate instance of Jira.
- Merging Jira instances – a company acquires another company. Both have their own Jira instances and decide to consolidate them into a single instance. Merging one Jira with another requires migrating all projects.
- Balancing the use of licenses – a company runs two instances of Jira, one with 500 user licenses, and another with 10,000 user licenses. If, in the bigger instance, only 8,000 users are actively working, you can move some projects from the smaller instance to improve the balance.
Project Configurator for Jira
The following guides describe how to migrate your projects with Project Configurator for Jira. The tool offers an export function that packs your configuration, issue data, and attachments into a single ZIP archive. You can then transfer it to the target server, and import your projects from the ZIP archive.