Creation of duplicate Fields of existing default fields during Cloud Migration

Question

Trialling the JIRA server to JIRA Cloud migration, I have noted that Fields have been created during Migration even though the same field is an existing default field.

Example: “start date” is a default field. The same field was migrated too with a field name as “Start Date (migrated)”.

Why does the migration create a “migrated” field for a field that is already existing in Cloud.

David Day_ Appcento · Answer

Yeah, this is a known behavior, Jira treats every import as a "new" field and appends "(migrated)" even for default fields like Start Date or Priority. It happens because the migration process doesn't do intelligent matching against existing fields by default.

The workaround for this? before you run your migration, export your custom field list from the source instance and compare it against what's already in the target. Any matches should be mapped explicitly rather than letting Jira auto-create new ones.

If you're using a migration tool that supports migration field cleanup (like Migration field cleanup), it'll flag these conflicts and clean up automatically so saves you from waking up to 50 new "Start Date" fields in your instance.

Michiel Schuijer_jlry2w · Answer

This still happens in 2024 Q3, even for Jira Cloud to Cloud migrations :(

Many, many duplicate fields, statuses, roles, etc. even when these with the same name already exist.

At least there should be an option to map these, if the process can't determine whether to use an existing status/role/etc. because now it is a huge amount of work each time a migration is done.

And, it is in Atlassian's best interest, because it is regarding migration between their own sites, not losing to another vendor.

Christian Pavelka-Ulfendahl_w0k48s · Answer

This seems similar to how the Jira Import Manager works. If you import issues that contain "Field Name", it will always create a new instance of that field, even if a field with the exact same name already exists. This is at least true when doing imports from json.

See https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSWSERVER-14687