Migrate a Confluence Cloud site to an existing cloud site
This page is for people who are currently using Confluence Cloud, and want to move their entire site to a different Confluence Cloud site.
For migrating from Confluence Server to Confluence Cloud, see Plan your Confluence Server to Cloud migration.
When to use this method
- When you want to move from an existing Confluence Cloud site to another Confluence Cloud site.
- When your new cloud site is Confluence-only. If you have both Confluence and Jira in your cloud site, the site import method outlined here will not be available in your Confluence Cloud site. Instead, you'll need to import all of your spaces individually. See Import a Confluence Space for information on how to do that.
Before you begin
Using the site export and import process will replace all content and users in your Confluence Cloud site, including:
- The content of all spaces exported from the other site.
- The users exported from the other site, including all administrators and non-administrators.
- The groups, and user memberships of those groups, exported from the other site.
- On this page, we will use the term 'source Confluence site' or 'source site' to mean the Confluence site you are copying the information from. The 'destination site' is the Confluence Cloud instance you are copying the information to.
Step 1: Back up your destination Confluence Cloud site
The import will remove all data on your destination site, including content, users, and groups. We strongly recommend you make a backup copy of the destination site and save the backup file on your local file system. To export the contents of your source Confluence site, follow the steps described in Create a site backup.
Before you back up your site, make sure all user accounts have a unique email address associated with them. If this isn't done, the import will fail. If you started an import and noticed that it imported all the data, and then failed, this may be the cause.
Step 2: Export the site content from the source Confluence site
To export the contents of your source Confluence site, follow the steps described in Create a site backup.
Remember to include attachments in your backup, and make sure all user accounts have a unique email address associated with them.
Step 3: Check the size limits
Site import in Confluence Cloud is restricted to a maximum 200 megabytes for the uncompressed XML files inside the backup zip file. This is the 'data size' of the backup. There's no limit to the file size and number of attachments.
When you try to do the import, Confluence will inform you if the backup data is too large.
To manually check the data size of the backup:
- Unzip the backup file.
- Sum the sizes of the XML files in the root directory of the zip file (this will be at least the file named
entities.xmland may also include XML files added by plugins).
What if the data size is okay?
If the data size of your site backup file is within the limits, import the site backup directly into the destination Confluence Cloud instance. See below.
What if the size limit is exceeded?
If the size of your site backup file is too large, you'll need to move the content space by space and ensure your user data is imported, too. This involves exporting each space individually. You can do this in your Cloud site, or using Confluence Server.
If the source site is a Confluence Cloud instance, you can copy your data to a temporary installed site running Confluence Server 5.10 or later so that you can create the space exports:
- Go to the Confluence download page and get the latest Confluence Server release for your operating system.
- Install Confluence as described in the Confluence Installation Guide.
- Import the data from your backup file (XML export) into your new Confluence installation. See Restore a Site in the Confluence Server documentation.
- Log in to your new temporary Confluence instance, using the following credentials:
- Username: sysadmin
- Password: sysadmin
- Change the password immediately after logging in.
- Export the spaces from the temporary site. See Export Content to Word, PDF, HTML and XML in the Confluence Server documentation.
- Import the spaces one by one into the destination Confluence Cloud instance. See Import a Confluence Space.
- Import your users. See Integrate with G Suite.
Step 4: Import the site content into your source Confluence Cloud site
If the data size of your site backup file is within the limit described above, import the site backup directly into the destination Confluence Cloud instance.
- In your source Confluence Cloud site, choose Settings in the Confluence sidebar.
- Choose Site import.
- Specify your file using the Browse button.
- Choose Import.
Apps
After migrating your data, you'll need to re-install any compatible apps, like Questions for Confluence and Team Calendars for Confluence.
You can check whether your essential apps are available for Confluence Server, Cloud or both on the Atlassian Marketplace.
For migrating from Confluence Server to Confluence Cloud, see Plan your Confluence Server to Cloud migration.