Trying to upgrade from 3.12 to OnDemand 5 - Am I stuck?

[Aleeda Crawley]

I'd like to migrate off my own dedicated hardward for JIRA to Atlassian OnDemand. Fewer headaches and less IT work, right?

Well, first I need to migrate my existing data, which is on JIRA 3.13. I went through the steps and OnDemand tells me that my data is too old. It needs 4.x data. So I need to upgrade my box to 4.x just to get a data export that OnDemand will accept.

My question is, is there any easy way out of this. Easy would be something short of upgrading my hardware to 4.x. Can I... request an OnDemand instance running 4.x? Use some utility to upgrade the export XML from 3.x to 4.x? Hand edit the XML file? Pay someone else to do it?

[Michael Knight · Accepted solution]

Hi Jesse,

I believe the importer should accept JIRA 3.13. What are the steps you followed and the actual error message you're receiving?

[Aleeda Crawley]

Oops, did I say 3.13? Here are my steps:

1. Backup Data to XML from my 3.12.1-#299 instance

2. ZIPped up the attachments directory

3. Copied both files to Webdav

4. In OnDemand went to JIRA Import, selected the two files and got this error:

JIRA Import Wizard - Error

Ops looks like something unexpected happened.

Errors The xml data you are trying to import is too old to be upgraded by this version of JIRA. For more information please see our upgrade documentation: http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Upgrading+JIRA+3.x+Data+to+JIRA+5.0</li<>>

If it's true that 3.13 will import then perhaps the easiest thing to do is upgrade to 3.13. I figure that that upgrade is much easier than to 4.x or 5.x.

[Michael Knight]

Sorry Jesse, I actually wasn't aware JIRA 5 brought in this requirement. Sorry for the misleading answer.

It does indeed appear that you will need to upgrade to JIRA 4.X first. Probably the easiest method would be to

1. install a local JIRA 4.4.5 from scratch,
2. generate an XML export of your 3.12 data,
3. import your 3.12 data into 4.4.5, and
4. obtain and XML backup from your 4.4.5 instance.