Installing old Jira - version doesn't exist?

Question

I have a JIRA project, that another team worked with, that I need to restore. Unfortunately, I have no reference to the JIRA version which was used for the project and the team that created/used it no longer exists. I do know it was setup on a Linux box and it was around version 6.2 but after installing more than 20 versions, from https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/download-archives, and attempting to restore the project's JIRA export zip file, none have worked.  Each one generated a 'wrong version' error.  I opened the activeobjects.xml file but this only contained mysql version information.

1) Is there any way to identify the version of the JIRA backup from the backup?

2) Is there any way to restore the file to a newer version of JIRA if the version, that the project was backed up on, no longer exists?

Jeremy Richards · Answer

damn, it would be nice it Atlassian placed that in the activeobjects.xml as well.

Thanks Nic

J.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

A JIRA backup is usually a zip archive with two files in it, entities.xml and activeobjects.xml, which you can open with a text editor after extracting them.

Near the top of entities.xml, you should find a line like this (the 17 there is the line number in the one I've just looked at, it might not be quite the same in yours):

17      JIRA Build                                    : 6.4.11#64026-sha1:78f6ec473a3f058bd5d6c30e9319c7ab376bdb9c

You can ignore the build id, it's just the 6.4.11 you need to see.

You could try to bodge the number in the file to import it into a later version, but it's risky - if the version is too far off, you'll just get errors, or worse, corrupted data in your target JIRA.