Backup a project before WF change

[Athas Mark]

Is running a project CSV export a viable way to create a back-up of a project before a workflow change?  Thus, if the change failed half-way through--assuming the project is now corrupt--I could delete then restore from the export?

[Hernan Halabi - Elite IT Consulting Group · Accepted solution]

Hello @Athas Mark I understand your concern but in my 10 years as administrator, I never faced this kind of problem when doing a workflow change. 

Now specifically to the question, yes you could do what you want but you will lose data in the middle anyway, like history of the tickets and potentially creation dates  as well (haven't checked lately if this would be the case nowadays). A full backup would solve this but you would have to restore everything which is also not the best option either

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I've seen a workflow change corrupt a project once (For background, I've been here a while - started with Jira 2 around 16-17 years ago).

The migration failed part way through (actually, someone stopped the server part way through.  I should have checked which system I was looking at!) and the only bit that went wrong was that some issues that were having their status changed to something else because their current status was not in the new workflow were not changed.

The workflow scheme was not changed, as that's the last step in the migration, so we ended up with a pile of issues that were in a new status that wasn't in the old workflow.  These could not be transitioned, but everything else worked.

The fix was simple - do the migration again!  

Nothing other than status, updated date, and the history (as it records the migration) are affected by workflow migrations, it's not worth worrying about a backup at that level.