Share your archiving successes and frustrations

[Kamil Kolonko]

Hi team, my name is Kamil and I'm working as an Engineering Manager in one of DC cross-product teams.

We’re currently exploring the role archiving plays in managing your data in Jira, Confluence, and Bitbucket Data Center, and would love to hear about your successes and frustrations with archiving in Confluence!

Not sure where to start? Perhaps think about these questions:

• Do the current Data Center archiving features meet your expectations?

• What prevents you (or your team members) from archiving spaces, projects, or issues?

• What would you like to see as the next improvement in archiving?

• Do you use workarounds or other ways of marking your content as archived?

[Aron Gombas _Midori_]

Does this topic include only the "archiving" feature built-in to Confluence DC or also that of the Better Content Archiving for Confluence app?

(We are developers of the app, thus I can share successes and frustrations related to the app and its integration with the core of Confluence Data Center.)

[Kamil Kolonko]

Hi Aron, please share! we'd be happy to hear any kind of feedback :)

[Aron Gombas _Midori_]

Maybe the biggest problem we have seen over the years is that Confluence has not been strict enough (maybe in present tense?) about data validation.

This allowed users create corrupt data. For example, we have seen pages with NULL titles, page hierarchies with circular references (even pages that are parents of themselves), attachments without owning pages, etc.

This corrupt data can easily stay below the radar and won't hurt the end-user, but when the Better Content Archiving app tries to move those to the archive space, every sort of cryptic errors happen typically on the database level. The solution is querying the tables and fix the data, then retry the archiving, but this is extremely frustrating, time consuming and sometimes even risky. What makes it even worse is that the larger the Confluence instance is (the larger the customer is), the higher the probability of these... :-/