Problem

The following appears in the atlassian-confluence.log during upgrade to Confluence 5.5 or later:

Recovery file generation failed: XXX

Cause

During Confluence start-up, after it has been determined that an upgrade is necessary, Confluence will generate an upgrade recovery file before and after the upgrade. These files are essentially partial database dumps, and they can be useful in cases where an upgrade task has failed and backups have not been taken.

When the recovery file generation fails for any reason, a warning message is added to atlassian-confluence.log file before continuing with the upgrade.

Resolution

While the warning will not cause the upgrade to fail. It should be taken seriously as it can mean that there would not be a way to recover if an upgrade were to fail in the future.

Solution 1

Ensure Confluence has been backed up, and disable the upgrade recovery file by adding

-Dconfluence.upgrade.recovery.file.enabled=false

to the system properties.

Solution 2

Ensure that Confluence home directory has not run out of disk space.