Confluence is configured to back up its data. A System Administrator can also manually perform this back up from the Administration Console.

(info) You need to have System Administrator permissions in order to perform this function.

Consider an Production backup strategy if your Confluence site is large or you are encountering problems with your automated backup.

Creating the Site Backup

To manually back up your site,

  2. Click 'Backup & Restore' in the 'Administration' section of the left-hand panel.
  3. Select 'Archive to backups folder' to store a copy of the backup in the same folder as Confluence's backups. (If you do not archive the backup it will be made available for you to download, and then deleted from the server after 24 hours).
  4. Select 'Backup attachments' to include attachments in your backup.
  5. Click 'Backup'.
    (info) Please note that this process will take a few minutes.

If you are running Confluence behind Apache and are facing timeout errors, please consider creating the export directly from Tomcat, instead of going through Apache. This will speed up the process and prevent timeouts.

Retrieving the Backup File

Confluence stores the backup as a zipped XML file in the 'backups' directory under the Confluence Home directory on your Confluence server. To find your Confluence Home directory, see the documentation. You will need access to the Confluence server in order to retrieve this file.

Enabling the Download of the Backup File via the Administration Console

By default, it is not possible to retrieve the backup file via the Confluence Administration Console. This feature is disabled for security reasons.

Administrators can enable this functionality by updating the relevant configuration property as described below. When enabled, you will be prompted to download the backup file when the backup process finished. However, we recommend that you turn the feature off in production environments.

To enable download of the backup file from the Administration Console,

  1. Edit the confluence.cfg.xml file found in the Confluence Home directory.
  2. Set the value of property admin.ui.allow.manual.backup.download to 'true' (without the quotation marks).
  3. Restart Confluence.

If the value of the above configuration property is 'true', it will be possible to download the backup file after manually backing up the site via the Confluence Administration Console. If the value of this property is 'false' or the property is not present in the configuration file, you will need to retrieve the backup file from the file system on the Confluence server. By default, the value is 'false'.

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