Partial migration from JIRA 6.4.5 to JIRA 7.3

Question

Hi there,

We have been using JIRA 6.4.5 for many years now. We have many projects, some dorment some active, which all use our own custom workflows. We want to move up to JIRA 7.3 but we don't want to bring everything across, so we thought the best approach would be to leave JIRA 6.4.3 server as is, create a fresh JIRA 7.3 and export/import the most recent projects/stories from JIRA 6.4.3 into JIRA 7.3 that we feel we want to take across and leave the rest in JIRA 6.4.3 as reference only.

Now doing a quick search suggests that you cannot export from an older version of JIRA into a newer version, so I am wondering what your recommended approach would be? We are also simplfying our workflows for JIRA 7.3 so we would also need the ability to map states from our legacy server to the new server.

We are able to create clones as everything runs in a VM so we can get a backup to do a dry run with.

One possible approach I can think of is to upgrade a clone of our legacy JIRA to version 7.3, and then do an export/import into the fresh install of 7.3. Does JIRA natively supporting mapping states or will I need an additonal plugin for this?

If I can avoid having to upgrade a snapshot of the legacy JIRA server that would be preferable, but I don't know if this will be possible.

Any thoughts/suggestions would be much appreciated.

Thanks,

Mike

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

Only that it could be a lot more work.  Depends on the volume of stuff you want to transfer across this way.

Mike M · Answer

Hi Nic,

Thanks for the prompt response. Thinking more on this, can you foresee any problems with abandoning that approach completely, but instead writing an app using the JIRA API's that exported from our legacy JIRA and imported into the new JIRA?

The API's are first class so I can't see us not being able to query any information we want to take across and this would give us far greater control of how we map everything from the old to the new.

Thoughts?

Thanks,

Mike

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

You've already hit on what I'd do - copy the 6.4.5 and upgrade the new system 7.3 so you can export/import.

JIRA's native export/import only takes issues and it does rely on the target JIRA projects having the configuration ready to accept the data.  It doesn't do any mapping at all.

But, you could take a couple of other routes after you've got a copy of 6.4.5 up to 7.3

* Change the 7.3 config to what you need, and delete the older data you don't want
* Use one of the project configuration add-ons to transfer the bits of configuration you want in the new system

And a mix of those could be used.