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Confluence site lost due to a mistake - no recovery? You have to be kidding!

Jose Solera

Our admin, working with some plug ins, made a mistake and somehow the entire site is gone. Poof!

What's Atlassian's respose? You are out of luck.

Really?

They say only the DR backups are taken and they are only good in DR situations.

Well, it's a disaster for us! It's been months and months of work that are gone in a few seconds. And no way to recover? Really? What kind of customer service is this? Time for an alternative?

Accepted answers

All comments

Steven F Behnke

Cloud or Server?

Also, there's very little detail here. Forgive me if I don't believe Atlassian said "You're out of luck." I'm sure it's more complex than you're making it out to be.

Tammy Lariscy

Cloud. Site was accidentally deactivated. Atlassian comments were that they could not help us recover the data. Still pushing customer support.

Jose Solera

@Steven F Behnke I don't have the actual comments as Tammy handled the communications but, in short, that was the message. Out of luck. Whether said that way or not, it is what was meant.

Cloud environment.

Jose Solera

Our account is up to date, so no payment issues.

Arthur Mack

How can plugins get a site decativated?

Jose Solera

Good question. Not sure how it happens. @Tammy Lariscy can you provide details?

Jose Solera

Bottom line, though, we lost the site and can't get it back. How it happened? Useful to know to prevent in the future but irrelevant to our problem right now.

Arthur Mack

I really have a hard time believing that playing around with plugins can get your site deactivated. I would have to agree with Steven that there is more to this.

Jose Solera

Sure but it's still gone. What caused it, while interesting, is irrelevant to our need to recover the site. 

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-

I can't work out a way that plugins could deactivate a site. I think when it comes to recovery, we need to know more detail on what happened.

Jose Solera

Why is knowing what happened important in recovery?

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-

Because it determines what options you might have for recovery and who has to take responsibility for restoration.

Tammy Lariscy

I was cleaning out plugins from the "Manage Applications" page in the admin console. After clearing out the old plugins, I returned to our confluence site and received a 404. I went into settings and saw the site was deactivated. I reactivated the site assuming it would all come back up. It didn't. I had a support ticket in within minutes.

The responses that I received from support all indicated that they were not able to recover the data. They also sent me a paragraph from their data storage FAQ's that indicates when a site is deactivated it is immediately purged.

Arthur Mack

That looks like why you may have had the issue, to manage plugins its much safer to be under under "Manage add-ons" and not "Manage Applications" which allows you to decativate your whole site. I can see where its possible under "Manage Applications" to click decativate plugins and keep on going and hit your site as well by accident.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-

There is no way "clearing out plugins" will do this. Something else went wrong, but the only people who can help you here is Atlassian support, because they need to read logs to work out what.

I imagine that they've said what happened in the support request.

Arthur Mack

All I was saying is that in "Manage Applications" which is under site admin has the decativate plugins is right next to "decativate site" while if you are under Settings and "Manage add-ons" they are not. I will now stop my speculation as that is just a guess and the logs should say what happened.

Steven F Behnke

Seems like it'd be awfully hard to miss this prompt. I suppose it could still be a layer 8 issue though.

Arthur Mack

Yep, that would wake me up for sure.

Steven F Behnke

It seems clear based on the comments from the affected party in this Discussion:

The clients accidentally "deactivated" the site by typing DEACTIVATE in the text box and then selecting Deactivate, through the large red warning prompt that I have in a screenshot above. The warning stipulates that data will be deleted immediately; The implication is that this is immediate and there is no hope for recovery.

The only hope, from what I can tell, is that Atlassian has un-advertised backups (extremely unlikely) or that the affected party had been using the Backup Site feature to store their own backups.

Jose Solera

Except that the dialog box (not sure if my person saw it or not but just in case) refers to "the application", not to the site or the spaces. So, if you deactivate a plug in, is that an application or is the entire site an application? In either case, the UI needs help as it is confusing.

Also, there should be a default backup capability for a cloud-provided service.

Thanks to everyone who's offered ideas but it seems that we are getting nowhere.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-

That box makes it absolutely clear that you will be destroying your data, without any backup. I can't work out any way of getting out of that box - someone clicked "deactivate" and typed in the word (Yes, I've just tried it, you can't not see that box)

Deactivating an add-on (or "app" as they now are) is a lot easier, and does not require a prompt, but that's because it does not remove any data.

There is a default backup capability - you go to backups, click it and download one. It can't know that you might deliberately destroy your data, ignore a clear warning and then change your mind and want to restore.

Tammy Lariscy

No, that box did not appear. I reported that to Atlassian last week.

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