Importing very old Jira data

Bryan Dobson1

I am faced with a rather difficult problem of being requested to import a very large number of tickets from one Jira project (hosted elsewhere) to our in house Jira installation.

Here is the kicker to my problem, while I have a login to the other Jira installation I cannot have access to a full backup. Secondly, the version from the other system is very old and upgrading is not at all a possiblity.

While I can export all of the ticket information as XML or Excel is it feasable to think that I would then be able to use that data to import it into the new system?

Natalie Hobson

It depends on what values you want to keep for the issues after importing to the newer instance - and you're not going to keep the history, comments, or attachments. I always try to discourage my users from asking for old issues to be moved between instances if possible; JIRA's not really meant to be a historical tool but an active one.

If they must be moved over, it is best to decide which field values you absolutely must keep; then you're going to have to figure out differences between the instances and ensure you update the values in the CSV cells so that they work on import. Some examples might be different usernames for accounts, missing resolutions or statuses, etc. It could mean a lot of replacing data in the file before you are able to import.