Documentation for JIRA 4.4. Documentation for other versions of JIRA is available too.
This page describes how to restore JIRA data from a JIRA XML backup. This process is typically conducted towards the end of Migrating JIRA to Another Server or splitting your JIRA instance across multiple servers.
If you wish restore a single project from your backup into an existing JIRA instance, refer to these instructions on restoring a project from backup instead.
When restoring data, all data in the existing JIRA database is deleted, including all user accounts. Before you begin, make sure you have the password to a login in the backup file that has the 'JIRA System Administrator' global permission.
Restoring JIRA from backup is a three stage process:
If you are restoring production data into a test JIRA instance for experimentation purposes, you probably want to disable JIRA's email interaction features before you begin:
-Datlassian.mail.senddisabled=true
flag.-Datlassian.mail.fetchdisabled=true
flag.Exactly how to set these flags is dependent on your particular application server, but for JIRA Standalone (i.e. Tomcat), it is done by setting the JAVA_OPTS environment variable before starting JIRA:
set JAVA_OPTS="-Datlassian.mail.senddisabled=true -Datlassian.mail.fetchdisabled=true" cd bin startup.bat
You could also try un-commenting the JAVA_OPTS="-Datlassian.mail.senddisabled=true -Datlassian.mail.fetchdisabled=true
line from your /bin/setenv.sh
file and then running startup.
Note: these instructions assume that you are restoring an XML backup. If you used native database tools to create your backup, the restore process will be tool-specific so these instructions do not apply to you.
caches/indexes
subdirectory of the JIRA Home Directory.It is recommended that you avoid passing through a proxy when performing an XML restore, especially if your JIRA instance is very large. Using a proxy may cause timeout errors.
If you created a backup of the attachments directory, you will need to restore the backup into a directory where JIRA can access it.
If you use a custom directory for storing your attachments, ensure that JIRA has read and write permissions to this directory and its subdirectories.
The process of restoring the attachments backup depends on the way it was created. Usually you can use the same tool to restore the backup as the one that was used to create it (see Backing up attachments).
If you are restoring the attachments into a different location (i.e. a different directory path) from where they were previously located (e.g. this will be the case when moving servers), please follow the instructions provided in Configuring attachments to change the location of the attachments directory so that JIRA can find the restored attachments.