Concerns with splitting large spaces into smaller ones?

[Jimmy Seddon]

Hello Everyone!

We are running Confluence Cloud Premium.  We also have a "Super" space that holds the majority of our pages and documents for the entire company (about 1000 employees).

I have been tasked with splitting out our R&D specific work from the "Super" space into its own smaller space.

The good news is that everything is parented under a single page. 

However the bad news, is that this would be moving hundreds if not thousands of pages with multiple versions and images/documents attached to various pages that are nested as deep as about 5 levels down.

I wanted to ask everyone's collective wisdom to see if anything has any red flags pop up about performing this type of move/split.

I will likely be doing it in the evening so that we aren't performing it at peak working hours, but I wasn't sure of there were other things, such as "that's simply too much content to move all at once" that I should be concerned about.

Thanks in advance!

[Hana Kučerová]

If you are on Premium plan, maybe the Sandbox functionality could be handy, like try some copy/move operations with your documents?

[Matt Doar]

Ouch! I see two parts to this

1. Identifying which pages go in which space. Labels, page names, hierarchy are a few choices

2. The actual move - from the UI, a plugin or custom script using the REST API. Probably I'd do this as a copy operation and then a separate archive of the original

Explain that this all takes time to do safely, and in staging first

[Liam Green]

@Jimmy Seddon I'm naturally really data risk-adverse - so internally I'm screaming "don't do it!".  I recognise this isn't a solution, or necessarily even an option, though.

My question would be instead of moving the parent page, could you create a new parent then move the children in smaller chunks?  I know that is more work.

Good luck!!

[Darryl Lee]

Yeah if all the R&D stuff is under a single page, I would spin up a Sandbox and then just try moving that one parent page, time it to see how long it takes, and see what, if anything breaks.

Sandbox is one of the most valuable features of Premium, specifically for things like this.

I wonder how long it takes these days to restore a backup though. Back when I had to do it manually it was slow.

[Matt Doar]

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/284/confluence-command-line-interface-cli?hosting=cloud&tab=overview is a better link for Bob's Cli in Cloud

[Matt Doar]

https://bobswift.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/CSOAP/pages/1059375249/copyPage

[Matt Doar]

https://developer.atlassian.com/cloud/confluence/rest/api-group-content---children-and-descendants/#api-wiki-rest-api-content-id-pagehierarchy-copy-post

[Matt Doar]

Alternate plan: lock all pages in the original space and make people do their own Move Page action in the UI if they want to use the page.

[Jimmy Seddon]

@Liam Green @Matt Doar I really appreciate the words of wisdom here!  I had my own reservations on doing this, and this confirms what I was thinking.

I will talk with the stakeholders about our plan of attack for this one.

Thank you so much for your input!