Why does my XML backup fail?

Question

Hi All,

I'm attempting to create a XML backup of our Jira Server. However, I am running into inexplicable issues.

1. Giving the backup a name works great until after pressing the "backup" button I get an error stating

File /var/jira/jira_home/export/backup.zip already exists.

Please confirm whether you want to replace this file.

I had never created that file before. I tried with multiple filenames. Always the same message.

2. After hitting "Replace file", the browser loading icon spins as if there is progress but that results in: "This page isn't working. "customerjirasite.whatever.com" didn't send any data. ERR_EMPTY_RESPONSE

All I want is a XML backup of our Jira, so I can migrate it over to Jira Cloud.

Can anybody help, please?

Rob C · Answer

Hi Andy,

Thanks for looking into it.

It seems that it's a network-related issue. I'm in touch with the owner of the JIRA instance and will update you here once I'm closer to a solution.

Regards,

Rob

Andy Heinzer · Answer

Hi Rob,

Sorry to hear you're having this XML backup problem.

What version of Jira is this?

The behavior you describe is strange.  I would not expect Jira to give you this kind of response to a backup request.  Is this by chance a large or Enterprise scale Jira site?  You can compare your site statistics against our guide in Jira Sizing Guide to better understand how we characterize different sized Jira sites.

By default Jira is already creating these XML backups or at least trying to.  You might want to check in the $JIRAHOME/export/ folder for these files.  They tend to have a naming convention such as 2019-Apr-23--1040.zip

Unless you have disabled this feature, these backups already exist in this folder.  You could use one of these if for some reason the manual backup is not working as expected.

If not, then I would be interested to see if you can try to bypass any proxy/SSL settings you might have in place for your Jira site to see if you can use an internal address to reach the Jira site and try to create this request.   The though here is that if your site has a large amount of data to backup, and a reverse proxy in front of Jira could have a connection timeout setting that might be tripping up the request before it can complete.  Bypassing this could avoid this timeout, if that is the cause here.

If you've done that and still are not getting the expected results, I would be interested to take a closer look at your $JIRAINSTALL/log/atlassian-jira.log file at this time to see if there is some other details there that might help identify the cause of this problem.

Thanks

Andy