This page establishes processes for taking an export of your Jira data, enabling the debug mode, and sharing any error logs and the outcome result with Atlassian.

Prerequisites

• For all the following procedures, you must be logged in as a user with Jira system administrator global permissions.
• The backup will be stored within the export  subdirectory of the Jira application (shared) home directory, make sure that Jira has the necessary file system permissions to read and write to this location.
• Jira stores the zipped backup file in the application home directory on the disk. Make sure there is sufficient free disk space of around 300-500GB to avoid out of disk space.
• To troubleshoot any errors, enable debug mode as mentioned below in the page.
  
  

• [Optional] If there is a need of configuring the announcement banner, see https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjiraserver/configuring-an-announcement-banner-938846985.html.

Backing up data

To take a backup, please follow the below steps:

• In the upper-right corner of the screen, select Administration > System.

• Under Import and export (the left-side panel), select Backup system to open the Backup Jira data page.

• In the File name field, enter the name of the backup file. Make sure that Jira has the necessary file system permissions to write to this location.

• Select the Backup button and wait until your Jira data is backed up, which might take hours depending on DB size. Jira will save your XML backup as a zipped archive file.

• When the backup is complete, you’ll see a message confirming that Jira has written its data to the file you specified.

Structure the export file

Once the backup is successfully completed, the zipped folder should have an output similar to the following:

JIRA-backup-<DATE>
├── activeobjects.xml
├── entities.xml

Share the outcome with Atlassian

After the successful export, we need following data, which you can add in the support ticket:

• How long the export process executed?
• What’s the size of the backup file (Zipped and UnZipped)?
• Execute below query in Jira Database, which will provide a sense of data distribution of Jira tables:

WITH tbl AS
  (SELECT table_schema,
          TABLE_NAME
   FROM information_schema.tables
   WHERE TABLE_NAME not like 'pg_%'
  AND TABLE_NAME NOT LIKE 'AO\%' ESCAPE '\'
AND TABLE_NAME NOT LIKE 'sql\%' ESCAPE '\'
AND TABLE_NAME NOT LIKE 'pg_\%' ESCAPE '\'
AND TABLE_NAME NOT LIKE 'jquartz\%' ESCAPE '\'
AND TABLE_NAME NOT LIKE 'ao\%' ESCAPE '\'
AND TABLE_NAME NOT LIKE 'flyway\%' ESCAPE '\'
AND table_schema in ('public'))
SELECT table_schema,
       TABLE_NAME,
       (xpath('/row/c/text()', query_to_xml(format('select count(*) as c from %I.%I', table_schema, TABLE_NAME), FALSE, TRUE, '')))[1]::text::int AS rows_n
FROM tbl
ORDER BY rows_n DESC;

SELECT pg_size_pretty(sum(pg_total_relation_size(relid))) FROM pg_catalog.pg_statio_user_tables

Error logs

If something goes wrong with the backup process, we'll need logs for troubleshooting. Follow the below steps to download the relevant logs:

• In the upper-right corner of the screen, select Administration > System.
• Go to Troubleshooting and Support > Create Support Zip > Customize Zip
• Select Jira Application logs, click on Save and then click on create zip

• Once the selected log file are ready it will show Download Zip option
• You can share the log files via Atlassian file service, see section Transfer files to Atlassian

Transfer log files to Atlassian

To transfer the error logs, our file service, transfer.atlassian.com, allows for the direct transmission of files to us through a web browser or via command line.

If you need to transfer a large file or files to Atlassian, you will need to first create a support request at support.atlassian.com. under the "Technical issues and bugs" category and title as "Jira Simulation testing" and Refer to How to Transfer Large Files to Atlassian for rest of this process.  

Cleanup checklist

• Disable the debug as mentioned in as mentioned below:

• If we need to troubleshoot or assist further, we recommend you keep log files for ~2-3 weeks before deleting them.