Documentation for JIRA 4.4. Documentation for other versions of JIRA is available too.
This page describes how to back up your JIRA data, and establish processes for maintaining continual backups. Backing up your JIRA data is the first step in upgrading your server to a new JIRA revision, or splitting your JIRA instance across multiple servers. See also Restoring JIRA data and Restoring a Project from Backup.
Creating a complete backup of JIRA consists of two stages:
There are two possibilities: native database backup tools, or JIRA's XML backup utility.
For production use, it is strongly recommended that for regular backups, you use native database backup tools instead of JIRA's XML backup service.
When JIRA is in use, XML backups are not guaranteed to be consistent as the database may be updated during the backup process. JIRA does not report any warnings or error messages when an XML backup is generated with inconsistencies and such XML backups will fail during the restore process. Native database backup tools offer a much more consistent and reliable means of storing (and restoring) data.
All serious databases come with tools to back up and restore databases (the 'MS' in RDBMS). We strongly recommend these tools in preference to the XML backup option described below, as they:
See the documentation for your database on how to set up periodic backups. This typically involves a cron job or Windows scheduled task invoking a command-line tool like mysqldump or pg_dump .
To perform a once-off backup, e.g. before an upgrade, follow the steps below.
You can also configure scheduled XML backups, as described in Automating JIRA Backups.
export
subdirectory of the JIRA Home Directory.data
directoryThe data
directory is a sub-directory of your JIRA Home Directory. It contains application data for JIRA, e.g. if you have attachments enabled, all files attached to JIRA issues are stored in the data\attachments
directory (not in the database).
To back up the data
directory, you need to create a snapshot of the data
directory (including all files and subdirectories), then back up the snapshot. Note that the directory structure under the data
directory must be preserved in the snapshot.
Creating this snapshot is an operating system-specific task, e.g.:
/etc/cron.daily
, backing up files to a directory like /var/backup/jira
. It is best to copy an existing script in /etc/cron.daily
to ensure local conventions (file locations, lockfiles, permissions) are adhered to.Your "attachments" directory may be located elsewhere
If you have put your attachments
directory in a custom location (see Configuring File Attachments) rather than inside the data
directory, you will also need to back up your attachments
directory using the snapshot method described above.