Is upgrade necessary if we go cloud?

Question

We are running on some old JIRA version (6.3). Is it necessary to go to the latest 7.x before we are going cloud or it is ok to start Cloud on 7.x and somehow export projects that we need? Is it possible? Or we have to do it in steps: upgrade to 7 first, then - cloud.

Danyal Iqbal · Accepted Answer

i would definitely recommend an upgrade to a newer release (7.x) before migrating. v6.3 is too old. i think 6.4 is the bottom limit for a successful upgrade.Export the backup from the upgraded installation.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted Answer

Yes.  The recommendation is "be on the latest version of Jira Server before you export the data".  There is some wiggle-room - when 7.9 was "latest", we did a direct 7.8 import ok, but there's no guarantee that even a small difference like that might not cause you problems or fail entirely.

There's no chance of it working from 6.3.

Upgrade it to 6.4, then 7.0, then 7.12 (latest at time of writing)