Import an Exported HTML Space back into Confluence

[Jana Rasmussen]

Hey All! I am still fairly new to Atlassian and to Confluence.  I am working with a partner who has used Confluence in the past and has data he exported as html from Confluence. We need to import it back in. He has the correct permissions, but it is giving some kind of error.  Is there a way to do this without having to manually prepare the space and pages and copy/paste the content in? How do we import an exported html space back into a Confluence space?

[Diego · Accepted solution]

Hello @Jana Rasmussen!

As I understand, you need to import a Confluence space into another Confluence site but you have only the HTML backup of said space.

Looking through our documentation, I could find this:

If you're importing content from another site, you may need to create an XML export of that content before importing it into your site. See Plan your Confluence Server to Cloud migration and Import a Confluence Space for more information.

Here is the full document:

• [Confluence Cloud] Import content into Confluence Cloud

If we look at the suggested document, we have the step by step on how to restore Confluence Spaces:

• [Confluence Cloud] Import a Confluence Cloud space

There, one of the steps is to export the space to the XML format so it can be restored into another Confluence Site.

The space export would need to be created in XML for the procedure to work. I hope this clarifies things.

Let us hear from you!

[Jana Rasmussen]

Thank you for your reply Diego.

Unfortunately, I am not sure this will be as helpful as I had hoped.  The download of the space occurred a few years ago so there isn't an opportunity to go back to the same space and create a new XML download of that space - it's not unavailable and all we have to work with is the HTML download. At the time, that was the instructions and should have been enough to restore the information to a new Confluence space - but your system has changed sufficiently in the interim that uploading an HTML isn't enough to preserve the links.  The best help we can seem to find is to pull the HTML into a word document and then upload the word document - but that won't preserve all the links and we'll have to re-create all that work again.  Isn't there any way to restore an HTML version to a space and preserve the links?  Otherwise, we have a lot of extra work for us that we didn't anticipate.

[Monique Khairuliana[ServiceRocket] · Accepted solution]

Hi @Jana Rasmussen ,

What was the error message? Based on this documentation, I think you can only import whole Confluence Space when it's an .xml format. 

[Jana Rasmussen]

At the time the space was downloaded, the option was to download as HTML. That was about 3 years ago. The space is gone now and we expected the HTML download to work as a new upload when needed in the future.  Now that it is the future, we are being told that HTML is not the right format and we need a different format in order for it to work. Is there a way to convert an HTML to an XML file and preserve links and data?

[Dan Caprioara]

Hi! I have a similar situation, a set of very simple HTML pages, with links between them. How do I get them in Confluence Cloud?