How to move the shared-home folder in Confluence Data Center

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Purpose

The shared-home folder in Confluence Data Center stores the Confluence attachments, backups, rendered previews, among other content. When migrating to a different disk or making changes to Confluence Data Center, you might want to update the location of your shared-home directory.

Finding the shared home for your Confluence application 

The location of your shared-home folder can be found in your <confluence-home>/confluence.cfg.xml file in the confluence.cluster.home property.

The location of the Confluence home directory is defined when you install Confluence. This location is stored in the confluence-init.properties file, which is located in the confluence/WEB-INF/classes directory of your Confluence Installation directory. When Confluence is running you can find the location of the home directory in  > General Configuration > System Information > Confluence Information - Confluence Home.

Solution

For this example, we will use /OLD_HOME/shared/ as the old path, and /NEW_HOME/shared/ as the new path. To update the shared-home folder:

  1. Shutdown Confluence
  2. Edit the confluence_home/confluence.cfg.xml and update the following line: 

    <property name="confluence.cluster.home">/OLD_HOME/shared</property>

    (info) This property for DC instance would be available if Confluence DC is running in cluster mode only. 

  3. Change that value to the new path: /NEW_HOME/shared/
    (info) Make sure to do this for every node of Confluence, as each node has a local copy of this file
  4. Run the following query and look for <backupPath>...</backupPath> tag: 

    select BANDANAVALUE
    from BANDANA
    where BANDANACONTEXT = '_GLOBAL'
    and BANDANAKEY = 'atlassian.confluence.settings';
  5. Run the following UPDATE statement on the database (this example is for PostgreSQL):

    update BANDANA
    set BANDANAVALUE = REPLACE(BANDANAVALUE, '<backupPath>OLD_BACKUP_PATH</backupPath>', '<backupPath>/NEW_HOME/shared/backups</backupPath>');
    where BANDANACONTEXT = '_GLOBAL'
    and BANDANAKEY = 'atlassian.confluence.settings';

    Always back up your data before performing any modifications to the database. If possible, test any alter, insert, update, or delete SQL commands on a staging server first.

  6. Copy any contents under the previous shared-home folder to the new location: 

    cp -R /OLD_HOME/shared/ /NEW_HOME/shared/
  7. Restart All the Confluence nodes


Once all the steps are completed, perform the following verifications to check that the new folder is in use: 

  • Confirm your attachments are accessible from each node of Confluence
  • Create an XML backup (Back up a Site) and confirm that it is created under the new location. 
    (warning) If the behaviour is not the expected, please review the solution/workaround stated in  CONFSERVER-53451 - Getting issue details... STATUS

If you prefer to modify the backup location from your Confluence UI and specific a different location (outside the shared-home directory), you can follow the steps outlined in Configuring Backups > Enabling Backup Path Configuration

Last modified on Apr 24, 2023

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