Questions for Confluence does migrate to Cloud — but it's a one-way door, so export first

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With Atlassian's phased retirement of Data Center announced https://www.atlassian.com/licensing/data-center-end-of-life a lot of teams are planning the Cloud move with years of Questions for Confluence data on board — and there's a detail in Atlassian's own migration guidance that deserves more attention than it gets.

The good news first: the Confluence Cloud Migration Assistant does migrate Questions for Confluence data. Atlassian's migration KB https://confluence.atlassian.com/spaces/MIGRATIONKB/pages/1345620608/Migrating+Questions+for+Confluence+App documents it, along with prerequisites that are easy to get wrong: migrated users and groups need product access first, migrating all questions requires selecting all users/groups and spaces (a partial selection migrates only that subset's content), and the app uses its system account to migrate content on behalf of deactivated users.

Now the detail that matters: per that same KB, if the migration lands partial or incomplete, re-migration is a real problem, because there is no export/import tool for the app on the Cloud side — a feature request exists, but it hasn't been implemented. Atlassian's KB does document a re-migration procedure, but it needs the source instance still running. In other words, this is a one-way door: if something goes sideways and your Data Center instance is already gone, there is no second attempt.

The insurance policy costs a little effort and buys a lot: before you switch anything off, export your Q&A data yourself. On Server/DC the app has a documented REST API https://docs.atlassian.com/confluence-questions/rest/index.html and Atlassian has a KB specifically about exporting Questions data https://support.atlassian.com/questions-for-confluence/kb/how-to-export-confluence-questions-data/ that walks through pulling your questions and their answers out to JSON. Do that, and keep the files somewhere safe. If the migration goes perfectly, you've lost nothing; if it doesn't, those files are the difference between an annoyance and years of answers gone.

Two more things worth checking before you commit to wherever Q&A ends up living on Cloud: can you get your data out of it again (apply the same export test to the destination you'd apply to the source), and do answered questions actually show up when people search in Confluence — because a Q&A archive nobody can find just means the same questions get asked again.

Full disclosure: I'm one of the people behind Prometheus Agency, the company that builds Answers, so read the next paragraph with that in mind. Everything above — the migration prerequisites, the export, the two checks — applies regardless of which tool you choose.

We built Answers around exactly that failure mode: every question and answer is stored as native Confluence content, so it's indexed by Confluence search and covered by your space permissions; it imports your exported Server/DC Q&A as JSON, and re-imports its own CSV backups; and it exports back out to CSV, so the one-way door stays open. It runs entirely on Atlassian-hosted infrastructure (Runs on Atlassian).

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/885353931/answers-q-a-for-confluence

Happy to answer migration questions in the comments either way — the export habit is the part I'd keep no matter what you install.