Site Backup and Restore

When setting up your Confluence site, it's important to consider how you will back up your data, and restore it, if things go wrong. 

Recommended backup strategy

Having a robust backup strategy for your Confluence site is essential. You should back up your database, install directory, and home directories (including attachments) on a regular basis, using the database administration and/or backup tool of your choice.

See Production Backup Strategy for more information. 

Scheduled XML backup

Confluence provides a scheduled XML backup option, which backs up your site by performing a full site XML export each day.  This method can be useful for small sites, test sites, or in addition to your database and directory backups. We don't recommend you rely solely on this backup method for your production site. 

Why XML site export is not suitable for larger sites...

There are a number of reasons why XML site backups are unsuitable for large Confluence sites:

  • As the number of pages in your site increases, the XML backup takes progressively longer to complete, and in extreme cases the process of generating the export can cause an outage.
  • XML backups can consume a lot of disk space rapidly. For example a 1GB Confluence site will create 30GB worth of backups in a month, if unattended.
  • If the XML export file is very large, restoring your site can take a long time, or may time out.
  • Marketplace and other user-installed apps are not included in the XML backup. After importing your backup into a new Confluence site, you will need to re-install all user installed apps.

See Configuring Backups to find out more about the scheduled XML backup, including how to disable this backup, or change how often this job runs.  

If you have a Confluence Data Center license, the scheduled XML backup is disabled by default. 

Manual XML backup

You can manually create an XML site backup at any time. 

Restoring your site from a backup

In the event do you need to restore your site from a backup, the way you do this depends on your backup method. 


Migrate to Confluence Cloud

If you're migrating from Confluence Server to Confluence Cloud, you can use the Confluence Cloud Migration Assistant to migrate your content and spaces. 

Last modified on Mar 31, 2023

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