Migrating Bitbucket Server to Cloud - Limitations of Git LFS and metadata

[Oliver Werner]

Hi all,

We recently moved both Confluence and Jira from Server to Cloud successfully. Currently we are investigating the transfer of Bitbucket Server and Bamboo to Bitbucket Cloud. There are, however, some hurdles that we cannot seem to circumvent. Our main issue is migrating our repositories from Bitbucket Server to Bitbucket Cloud. 
We would like to know if someone has other ideas we could try to solve. I will describe our situation and what we have tried so far below.

As a medical device company, we have high standards on quality assurance and traceability. This leaves us with the requirement that we need to migrate the metadata (i.e. comments, pull-requests, approvals etc.) of our repositories. Another issue is that multiple repositories are quite large due to test data. Most of these repositories use Git LFS. Git LFS is also a requirement of Bitbucket Cloud due to its repository size limitation.

The current limitations of the migration are listed by Atlassian here. They mention that Git LFS repositories are not migratable with the BCMA tool, although this is, to our knowledge, the only way to copy the metadata.

We've tried rewriting the Git LFS repositories to non-Git LFS prior to migration with BCMA but that did not work. 

Is there a way to get both our metadata and repositories with Git LFS in Bitbucket Cloud? A way to archive the metadata (i.e. not copying it to the Cloud) would also work for us.

Thanks in advance!

Kind regards,

Oliver

[Syahrul]

Hi @Oliver Werner 

G'Day!

The BCMA itself doesn't migrate LFS files because the "git lfs" package can't be installed on the same host machine as the Bitbucket server without causing issues with the Bitbucket application itself. You can actually migrate the repositories normally via the BCMA tools without LFS first so you can migrate all the metadata.

Then it's fairly simple to manually migrate the LFS after the BCMA is complete. To do this, run the below steps for each repo containing LFS files. You can find a similar set of steps in our Git LFS tutorial under the "Moving a Git LFS repository between hosts" section.

1. Clone the source repo from your Bitbucket server
2. Fetch all LFS files to ensure you have all the files in your local copy

   git lfs fetch --all

3. Set a new remote to the clone URL of the repo within Bitbucket Cloud

   git remote add cloud <cloud clone url>

4. Push all LFS files to the Cloud

   git lfs push --all cloud

I hope this helps, please let me know if you have any additional questions.

–
Mohammad Syahrul
Support Engineer, Bitbucket Cloud