Archive content/data in confluence cloud to external drive, before deleting product access

[Nisha Nair]

Good afternoon,

Due to the non-usage of the Confluence Cloud and Advanced tables for Confluence (from last 4 years), management have decided to delete these products from our current Atlassian subscription.

Please advise if there are better ways to archive the content on both these products in an easier way, so we have complied with the record keeping aspect as a part of the project.

Thanking in advance,

Regards,

Nisha

[Aron Gombas _Midori_ · Accepted solution]

If you don't need any sophisticated way and you don't have the plan to restore the content to Confluence, then you could just export your spaces to separate PDF files.  It's easy, fast and the content can be shared and can be made searchable in any document management system. 

Otherwise create a regular backup of your Confluence site.

[Nisha Nair]

I did start downloading the Spaces as pdf files, as well as all other attachments that can be downloaded as pdf format. You are correct, we are mostly very unlikely to restore this content to Confluence - if in future we do re-enable the cloud subscription.

How can I do the regular back-up of confluence and we also have Advanced tables for conflunce that is going to be terminated as well.

Thanks, Nisha.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

The only real option is to get a full backup of the Cloud system, download it and put it on your external drive. 

I would strongly recommend getting a copy of the current latest version of Confluence Server installation and keeping that with the backup.  No need to install it, unless you want access to the "archive", just keep a copy handy in case you do need it.

[Nisha Nair]

Would it still be able to searched within, as we are going to terminate subscription to the Confluence product? I shall try and do the above to see if it actually is feasible. Thank you for your suggestion.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

The export file you get from Cloud is a couple of xml files compressed into an archive.  As XML, yes, it's theoretically possible to build something that would search and interpret, but it would probably be slow and quite a lot of work to build, and a far quicker thing to do would be create a Confluence (server or cloud and as temporary as you want) and import it.

A lot of people moving off Confluence actually never quite do - they create a new, or strip down their current Confluence to a $10 system with the permissions simplified down to "one archive user who can read everything, but no-one has write"

This is quite interesting for my squad at the moment - we're increasingly seeing really old Confluences that this has happened to being re-instated, and people coming to us to help get them back into a usable state, either on much more recent versions of Confluence or moved to Cloud.