Hello everyone,
I’m Lakshmi Manasi Behl, Senior Product Manager for Atlassian’s Backup and Restore capabilities.
Since we announced the new backup and restore experience last month, I’ve talked to many customers who’ve shared some really excellent insights. But one thing I noticed is that most customers don’t seem to know that the new experience comes with a new API!
When we built the new experience, we built a UI and an API because we knew that enterprise customers and developers needed to automate and integrate their backup processes so that they could scale their data protection workflows.
Who’s eligible?
Anyone who’s currently in our New backup and restore experience open beta can use the API! As a reminder, from our earlier community post, the following customers are eligible:
If you’re on an Enterprise plan for Jira*, Confluence, or Jira Service Management, you’re automatically enrolled in the open beta. The API supports backup and restore operations across all your organization’s sites—including Jira, Confluence, Jira Service Management, and Jira Product Discovery—not just those on Enterprise plans.
*All Jira family apps (Jira, Jira Service Management, and Jira Product Discovery) are backed up together and cannot be backed up individually.
Why an API? What problem are we solving
Many organizations must take backups as part of their change management processes or compliance workflows, which can span different systems and tools, necessitating homegrown data protection solutions. This API will enable:
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Integration and Interoperability: This allows you to centralize separate but related activities, making calls to different systems from a single script for easy maintenance.
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Flexibility and Customization: You can use other technologies to extend the capabilities of our API, providing a more personalized and customer-focused solution.
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Admin Speed and Efficiency: For tech-savvy admins, tweaking a script that makes changes via an API can be quicker than using the UI.
What are some potential use-cases?
With an API for the new backup and restore experience, you can:
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Schedule and trigger backups programmatically
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Program notifications at various touchpoints
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Restore data to any viable site via API calls
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Integrate backup and restore into your monitoring, alerting, or orchestration tools
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Meet compliance and audit requirements with automated proof of backup
How to Get Started
If you have admin permissions, you can use the API immediately.
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Review this backup and restore API documentation for authentication, endpoints, and usage examples.
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Use your preferred tools (curl, Postman, custom scripts) to interact with the API.
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For UI-based management, you can still access admin.atlassian.com > Settings > Backup and restore.
We encourage you to test assigning a product policy and restoring app data from a backup using the API as part of your open beta participation.
API Only Capabilities
In addition to allowing you to programmatically perform any actions which are available to you in the UI, such as automated backups, restore, and create or edit policies, APIs allow you to :
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Ability to send notifications: You can script notifications based on the events thrown after operations, such as backup completion and restore completion, to ensure you don't have to check the status of the operations manually.
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Backup programmatically before a change: Integrate with the one-time backup feature with any other change management processes.
As a reminder, most customers can expect a 24-hour RPO and 12-hour RTO during Open Beta, whether using UI or API. Guardrails are in place for large data volumes - read here for more. If you exceed these, you may experience longer times; please contact Atlassian Support for large restores.
For more details, see the backup and restore API documentation and our backup and restore support documentation.
What’s Next?
As we approach general availability of the new backup and restore experience, we’ll continue to refine the API based on your feedback. Currently, access is limited to Enterprise plans, but we’re exploring broader availability as a paid offering at GA. Stay tuned for updates!
Cheers,
Lakshmi Manasi Behl
Additional Resources:
