Offline JIRA backup

Question

In our production environment, we plan on having two JIRA servers.  One is going to be the primary, and the second will be used for testing changes/upgrades before installing to the primary.

The secondary server will also act as a backup, in that if we ever need to failover to it due to the primary being down, we can do so.

Since the secondary should always be at the latest and greatest, my goal would be to take the latest dump of the issues on the primary (still need to work that out with Postgres) database to the secondary.

However, and I am not even at the place to test this, in building the two servers, I noticed that I had to manually setup things like ScriptRunner behaviors because custom field IDs were different between the two instances (I use Botron configuration manager to export most of the project).  It seems like if I backup the primary database and try to import to the failover server, issues wouldn't port because of those custom fields.

Is this a correct assumption?  When doing a backup of the JIRA db, is the idea to pretty much do a complete export/import/replace of the db?  Will doing so grab everything within JIRA? Including things like those ScriptRunner behaviors I normally have to manually setup between environments?

Thanks!

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

It's never been possible in the baseline product.  I suspect they are confusing it with Confluence, where you could do it (From memory, versions 3.0 to 5.4, but data-centre made it redundant so they stopped)

Jason Adam · Answer

Ah I didn't realize that.  According to our JIRA admins on another project (mind you, they're using a much older version), they said they were storing their attachments as blobs/clobs in the db.  Guessing they're mistaken.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

Definitely.  A database backup is the recommended solution for backups and restoring to test systems.  If you want to look at advanced disaster recovery, then replication is a word that crops up quickly, but for most people "I have a copy of the database and the attachments" is good enough.

If you keep scripts in-line, they're in the database.  If you use the "run from file" option, then they are text files in <jira home>/plugins/scripts usually, so just copy that and you'll be fine.

Attachments cannot be placed in the database, but they're easy to share/synchronise (rsync or shared storage works fine in most cases, and even if you lose a couple, it's just broken links on issues, nothing else stops working)