Documentation for JIRA 5.0. Documentation for other versions of JIRA is available too.

To replicate reported problems, Atlassian support staff may ask you for a copy of your JIRA data.

 

As of JIRA 4.1.1, it is no longer possible to send data via the Administraion -> Support Request page. Please see below for instructions on providing a manual XML Backup.

Manual XML Backup (Recommended For Email Filters or Large Backups)

To create an anonymous a backup locally,

  1. Login as a user with global administrator access.
  2. Bring up the administration page by clicking either on the "Administration" link on the top bar or the title of the Administration box on the dashboard:
  3. On the panel on the left, under the title "Import & Export", click "Backup Data to XML". This will bring up the "Backup JIRA data" page.
  4. In the form, fill in the File path data entry box with a full path, including filename, that JIRA can write to.
  5. Select the "Backup as Zip" checkbox.  (if you want to anonymize the data, see below).
  6. Click the Backup button, and be patient.
  7. JIRA will return, confirming that it has written out the content to the file specified above.
  8. Attach the generated file on disk to a support request. As the support site runs over SSL this is more secure than email, and you can remove attachments if you like.

Anonymizing data

For JIRA versions 3.7 through to 4.1, data sent via Administration -> Support Request is anonymised by default, and it is thus the easiest route to sending us anonymised data (but be sure your mail server has a username/password specified, so relaying is allowed).

As of JIRA 4.1.1, it is no longer possible to send data via the Administration -> Support Request page. To do so, please login to Atlassian Support and attach the data to the existing issue.

Support requests are resolved much faster if a data export is provided. However, with sometimes this is not an option because the data contains sensitive information.

In JIRA 3.7.x to 4.1, JIRA automatically anonymises data sent to Atlassian from the Administration -> Support Request page. For earlier or later versions, or people who want to anonymise JIRA data from the command-line, we've created a data 'anonymiser', which replaces most text in JIRA XML backups with x's.

The anonymiser can be downloaded from here.

Unzip the package, then open a console and in the jira_anon directory run:

$ java -jar joost.jar <name of your backup file.xml> anon.stx > <name of the anonymised backup file to be generated.xml>

For example:

$ java -jar joost.jar backup.xml anon.stx > anon-backup.xml

Then zip the generated backup XML file, and attach it to a support case on https://support.atlassian.com

The anonymiser currently replaces the following text with x's:

  • Issue summary, environment, and description
  • Comments, work logs, change logs
  • Project descriptions
  • Descriptions for most elements (notification schemes, permission schemes, resolutions)
  • Attachment file names.
  • "Unlimited text" custom fields

Check anon-backup.xml to ensure it's clean enough for your needs before you send to us.

Problems?

Invalid XML Characters

If, when you run the anonymiser, you get an error indicating that there are invalid XML characters in the XML backup of your database, run our utility to remove invalid XML characters first before anonymising.

Out of Memory / Heap Space Errors

If creating your anon-backup.xml partway through, you are likely facing a memory limitation with running the 'java' command with the default settings. To allow the command more memory for the command, simply add arguments after the 'java' command, like so:

$ java -Xms512m -Xmx512m -jar joost.jar backup.xml anon.stx > anon-backup.xml

Note: you may need to adjust the memory allocation beyond '512m' if the process continues to fail.

Java Version

You will need Java 1.4 or above to run this. You can check your Java version by running java -version, eg:

$ java -version
java version "1.5.0_07"
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.5.0_07-b03)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.5.0_07-b03, mixed mode, sharing)

If you find yourself using JDK 1.3 or earlier, check your path (echo %PATH% on Windows, echo $PATH on Unix) and ensure that the right version of Java is at the beginning. See the docs for more info on setting up Java.

The screenshot below is a simple example of how it is run in the command prompt of Windows XP:

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