Can Jira Cloud users make changes during backup?

Margot Shaya

I need to make a backup of our Jira Software Cloud instance. Can users continue to make changes to projects and issues during the backup? If not, about how long might the system be unavailable? Also, what is the best way to restrict user permissions so that no changes occur? 

Thanks in advance!

Andy Heinzer

Hi Margot,

Yes, end users can make changes to Jira Cloud even when a backup is being created.  How long it takes to create a backup is dependent upon a number of factors.  What I would recommend doing is starting the backup, and then check back frequently to determine approximately how long it took to complete.  If you can quickly determine the time it took to complete this, let's say 10 minutes, then you can use a JQL query such as

updated >= -10m

in order to see all the issues in Jira that have been updated in the past 10 minutes from the time this query was run.  This can at least help you to see what issues might have a discrepancy between the time the backup was started and what is on the site right now.

As for restricting users from making changes during that time, that is considerably harder to do.  It is possible if you change the permission scheme in use by every company managed project to use a scheme that does not grant these users create/edit permissions.  However given how extensive and customizable each project can be, this is not always a feasible task to achieve quickly in all cases.  If all your company managed projects are using the same permission scheme, then this can be done very quickly, but if they are each unique, then this can become very tedious to complete.  Also, this does not take into account the potential changes in team-managed projects.  This is because the way permissions are managed in those project types is completely different from the company managed projects.

Instead of trying to completely lock down the site here, I would try to focus on a time of day when your site typically has a low number of active users and attempt to create the backup at that time.  The JQL query can be useful to get a sense of how many changes are happening to how many issues in any specific time interval.

I hope this helps, let me know if you have any questions or concerns about this approach.

Andy