Migrating from 7.11 to 8.4

Question

Hello!  At work we are migrating from Jira Core 7.11 to 8.4, but moving to brand new hardware, so I'm trying to figure out what the best approach to switching over will be.

We use Postgres 10.4 for our database.

Would the best approach be to export the full database and transfer it to the new hardware, then install 8.4 to that server and point it to the existing database?

Or would simply doing an export of all our issues to a file in 7.11 and then importing to the new server?

I guess there is also the possibility that the best thing to do is install 7.11 on the new hardware, import the existing database to this new server, and then run though the 8.4 upgrade but that seems cumbersome.

Thoughts?

Ravi Sagar _Sparxsys_ · Answer

Hi @Jason Adam

A bit confused now. Are you doing an upgrade? or moving your Jira to different server? or selectively moving few projects from one server (7.11) to another server (8.4).

In case you do full migration of Jira from one server to another or even upgrade the backup (xml or database) will restore everything for you - projects, issues, custom fields, scripts (you need to test them though).

For full server migration you don't need to use Configuration Manager or Project Configurator (although you can), it is only for moving issues and configurations for one or more projects. Use case for these add-ons are doing consolidations and pushing changes from staging to production and few more.

Ravi

Jason Adam · Answer

Thanks Ravi.  Yeah I've already read through those links, so I guess my question should be a little more specific.

I have 8.4 installed in two different test/integration environments already and have upgraded all our plugins to the 8.4 compatible versions.  We also have our own installer that lays down a server.xml, scripts, updates to email templates, etc that I've gone through and everything checks out fine.

I'm mainly concerned with getting all of the existing issues off the old database and into the new one. Since we already have procedures for importing our project workflows using Configuration Manager, setting up all our Behaviours and Script Listeners, etc etc the biggest concern is user created issues.  We have a ton of custom fields and using the project CSV export and import doesn't seem to work very well with our issues (only a very small handful of custom fields show up in the field mapping of the import for some reason).

But perhaps just doing a full backup and then restore to 8.4 and afterwards going through all our specific processes to put in custom stuff to ensure everything is good is the best approach.

Thanks again.

Ravi Sagar _Sparxsys_ · Answer

Hi @Jason Adam

You are upgrading and migrating at the same time, which is fine since you are not on very old version of Jira. There are few ways to do an export.

* XML export (which can be restored) + file attachments
* Database export + file attachments

You can install a blank new version of Jira on your target where you can restore your old data, configurations and attachments. You will also have to re-do any modifications that you might have done in your Jira application directory and may be other places.

This is just to give you a hint. For more details look at the following links.

https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjiraserver/upgrading-jira-applications-938846936.html

https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjiraserver/migrating-jira-applications-to-another-server-938846962.html

Do it on a test environment first, check apps compatibility, read the release notes of the target Jira version and read the documentation.

Ravi