Hola Mahanth,
The two existing answers highlight the key distinction: Atlassian’s platform-level disaster recovery protects the availability of Atlassian Cloud, but it shouldn’t be treated as a customer-accessible backup for accidental deletions, misconfigured automation, or unwanted bulk changes. For those customer-caused incidents, you need your own recoverable backup strategy.
Jira Cloud’s Backup Manager can create downloadable site exports that include work items, configuration, boards, sprints, comments, users, groups, and, optionally, attachments. It doesn’t include everything, though. Automation rules, Marketplace app data, Assets data, Opsgenie-powered operations data, and some other product-specific data aren’t included. Backups containing attachments can only be created every 48 hours, so this is useful for periodic exports but not for low-RPO disaster recovery. Atlassian documents the contents and limitations here.
Atlassian also now offers Atlassian Backup and Restore as a paid add-on for Jira Premium and Enterprise subscriptions. It supports one-time, daily, or weekly backup policies, stores backups for 30 days, and provides organization-admin restore controls. Marketplace app data still isn’t included.
The native restore model is important to understand before relying on it. Atlassian Backup and Restore restores into an empty Jira app in the same organization and region. It isn’t an in-place rollback of a live production site, and it doesn’t provide a simple “restore these three deleted work items” button. The target can’t contain active, archived, deleted, or trashed customer data.
For a small-scale deletion, the practical recovery pattern is usually to restore the backup into an empty temporary site or sandbox, validate the recovered data there, export the affected work items, and import them back into production. That process may restore the work item content, but it won’t necessarily recreate every relationship, history entry, app property, or integration exactly as it originally existed. Full-site recovery is more complete but has a much greater operational impact.
I’d build the runbook around your recovery objectives rather than around the existence of a backup button. Document which Jira data is business-critical, the maximum acceptable data loss, how quickly service must be restored, which app data needs separate protection, who can authorize a restore, where backups are stored, and how restored data will be validated. Restrict Delete work items and bulk-change permissions as well, since prevention is considerably cleaner than reconstruction.
Testing is essential. A backup that’s never been restored is only a hopeful zip file. At least annually, restore into a non-production target and verify work items, attachments, comments, boards, sprints, users, permissions, automation rules, integrations, and Marketplace app data. Record what’s missing and assign a separate recovery method for those gaps.
During an incident, contact Atlassian Support and open the case at the severity that matches the business impact. Include the site URL, affected projects and work item keys, the earliest known occurrence, suspected cause, exact timestamps and time zone, audit log evidence, screenshots, recent bulk changes or automation activity, and whether changes are still occurring. Premium and Enterprise provide enhanced support response targets, but the product availability SLA isn’t the same thing as a guaranteed recovery time for customer-deleted data.
Before choosing between Atlassian Backup and Restore and a Marketplace solution, compare restore granularity, app data coverage, retention, off-platform storage, immutable backups, recovery testing, and the ability to restore configuration and work items. Atlassian’s Backup and Restore overview is here.
Thanks,
James
You must be a registered user to add a comment. If you've already registered, sign in. Otherwise, register and sign in.