Establishing a production system backup solution

Atlassian recommends establishing an alternative database backup strategy:

• Create a backup or dump of your database using tools provided by your database
   To avoid any data inconsistency and corruption, it is recommended to shut down Confluence before creating a database backup or dump.
• Create a file system backup of your Confluence home directory

Once this is in place, disable the daily backups through the scheduled jobs feature via 'Administration Console > Administration > Scheduled Jobs'.

We want to stress that creating these two backups is better than having a Confluence XML backup. It is more robust and far more reliable for large production instances. You will be able to restore your whole site, including all data, attachments and configuration information intact with these two backups. See Restoring Data from other Backups.

Which files need to be backed up?

Backing up the whole home directory is the safest option, however most files and directories are populated on startup and can be ignored. At minimum, these files/directories must be backed up:

• attachments – but If you store your attachments in the database then you can ignore the attachments directory
  
• confluence.cfg.xml

The rest of the directories will be auto-populated on start up. You may also like to backup these directories:

• config – if you have modified your ehcache.xml file.
• index – if your site is large or reindexing takes a long time – this will avoid the need for a full reindex when restoring.

How do I restore?

Take a look a the Migrating Confluence Between Servers document for instructions on restoring a backup using this technique.

Other processes

XML backups are described and used for other processes in Confluence, like upgrading and moving servers. Using the backup strategy described above will work for those processes too.

• Our upgrade guide does not require the use of an XML backup (although the earlier Confluence upgrade procedure, and the JIRA upgrade guide, do use XML backups).
• Our migrate server procedure– used to set up a test server – can use a SQL dump as well.
• The database migration procedure uses the XML backup for small data sets. Large data sets will require third party database migration tools.