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What home directory folders to backup on upgrade?

jbartlett86

Hi,

We are in the middle of writing a automated process to complete a database backup and home folder backup when a Jira upgrade takes place to ensure rollback is possible (as aligned with the Atlassian recommendations).

We are however unsure of which directories we really need to backup. My understanding is the backup is recommended because the upgrade itself can change data in these folders making rollback impossible, however I'm wondering if certain folders would fall outside of this. for instance:

/var/atlassian/application-data/jira/data/attachments

/var/atlassian/application-data/jira/data/avatars

/var/atlassian/application-data/jira/log

/var/atlassian/application-data/jira/export

/var/atlassian/application-data/jira/import

/var/atlassian/application-data/jira/tmp

/var/atlassian/application-data/jira/caches

Can these directories be excluded?

Thanks,

John

Accepted answers

JP _AC Bielefeld Leader_

You must backup

/var/atlassian/application-data/jira/data/attachments

/var/atlassian/application-data/jira/data/avatars

at least. These directories contain the issue specific attachments & user avatars. They're not stored on your database backup.

Writing about the tmp,import, export directories: You might want to skip them.

Not sure about the caches dir...

Best

All comments

Michael Wohlgemuth

Greetings,

if you are doing a manual install, you dont have to backup the installation directory, as long as you have a different one for the new installation. What do i mean?

Let's say you installed JIRA in /opt/atlassian/jira/
You download the tar for JIRA 8.3.0
You extract JIRA 8.3.0 to /opt/atlassian/jira-8.3.0/
You edit the files you need to edit (including, but not necessarily limited to: server.xml, jira-application.properties and so on) in the new install directory
You execute /opt/atlassian/jira-8.3.0/bin/start-jira.sh

If you are going for the installer route, i would recommend backing up the whole installation dir. Same is true, regardless of the way you choose, for the home directory.

Maybe this helps.

regards

Michael Wohlgemuth

I just realized how much i did not answer your question. Excuse me, for i was carried away.

The directories specified by you are, as far as i can tell, in the homedirectory and should be backed up. Do i know if jira changes files in there when the upgrade takes place? No, i do not.

jbartlett86

Hi,

Thanks for your answer.

We are hosting JIRA in kubernetes and the installation directory isn't on a persisted volume and doesn't require backing up (the contents are part of the container).

The home directory is all we really need to worry about as that is the data that lives outside of that container on the pv.

I guess what I'm after is more the reasoning behind why those folders need backing up as whilst we can and have done this, those specific folders add quite a bit of time to our overall backup time and I cannot see why upgrading would cause the data in at the very least the backup, import and log directories to change and break rollbacks.

Thanks,

John

JP _AC Bielefeld Leader_

You must backup

/var/atlassian/application-data/jira/data/attachments

/var/atlassian/application-data/jira/data/avatars

at least. These directories contain the issue specific attachments & user avatars. They're not stored on your database backup.

Writing about the tmp,import, export directories: You might want to skip them.

Not sure about the caches dir...

Best

jbartlett86

Thank you for this.

One question, what about the upgrade would make you need to backup the attachment and avatars directories? Is JIRA expecting to make changes to these directories as part of an upgrade?

Thanks,
John

JP _AC Bielefeld Leader_

No, Jira will not make any changes to these folders, but this is data which is not regenerated (like plugin directories), if anything goes wrong. I would always backup the database together with these folders to have a consistent state of all issue dependent data.

Best

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