How to verify a Confluence restore

Shreyance Shaw

Hi,

As part of our disaster recovery plans we're taking backups of Confluence, Postgres in the backend.
Using Postgres dump to dump the file and restore it on a separate DB. 

Copy all the installation and home directory files from the Confluence production to the replica.

We'd like to schedule a restore of the most recent backup and verify it's a 'good' restore

Provided we are able to bring up the Confluence replica, What can we do to verify the restored Confluence

Any things provided by Confluence which tells me the application has no corruption or restore issues ?

Adrien Ragot 2

I'm not aware that Confluence has a self-check process. I personally highly trust the global restore because it is a very low-level export/import of the database. The per-space import is much more complicated (hence may introduce errors) but the global restore is great. Here are things you could manually check:

• Check the base url is correct,
• Check that mentions on pages appear correctly (Is the link correct?). Check it for one user in each user directory. You most probably have only one directory (either LDAP or JIRA or internal), but in case you have a cascade of them, it's interesting to check. If you restore because a day of production data was lost, then don't forget to delete again users which have been deleted during that day.
• Check that Application Links with other software (JIRA, Bamboo, etc...) work properly (URL must be correct and the authentication between applications may need a check).
• Add-ons will work; but maybe you need to check some add-ons that have a synchronization with the outside world (e.g. if an add-on has an OAuth connection with another service like Twitter or something proprietary).

I don't think you should test every single Confluence feature; If users and applinks are properly restored, everything else should work smoothly.