Automated Confluence Cloud Backups

[Mark Winston]

I've recently learned that Atlassian doesn't provide any official support for automated backups of Confluence and Jira Cloud applications.  However, the support team has referred me to these two options discussed here...

1. Using these Scripts.
2. Using the Automation tool.

Upon review of these two options, I'm having trouble making use of them for the following two reasons.  

1. For Confluence, both options above are creating Confluence Cloud Site backups and there is no way to import the backups if you have both Jira and Confluence Cloud as discussed here.  
2. The Automation tool creates backups, however, it provides no method to automatically download them also.  

Can someone please help confirm if my understanding above is correct?  Hopefully I'm missing something that will allow me to make use of one of these options to backup my Confluence and Jira sites. 

Any guidance is much appreciated as I need a way to do automatic backups.  I'm tagging @Stephen Sifers and @Dario B as they appear to knowledgeable about the scripts.  

Thanks for your help!

Mark

[Prince Nyeche · Accepted solution]

Hi @Mark Winston 

Both documentation are ways to generate and get the backup, using the script version you can automate the download to your local file system or you can simply add a get request to get the file after its generated on the script. The Automation for Jira version only triggers it, for you to download at a later time. In both situations, using a script that involves running locally, which you can add a Cron job to trigger it at certain intervals as long as your machine is turned on seems better.

Although, the system is not perfect, but i'm very sure given the limitations other users have found ways to trigger and save locally or push to AWS S3 for the downloaded backup file. The reason that you cannot really too much on this API is because its not official and when it's not official, it is subject to different changes at any point in time. However it is still useful in order to grab the data required automatedly.

Unfortunately the restore from backup for Confluence won't be available in regards to your first reason, if you have both Jira and Confluence. it's a very tricky and complicated process to restore confluence alone with the Jira Instance active. So if the concern is directed towards confluence, the scripts will indeed help perform an entire backup but it can't perform a backup of a space by space export, that's a limitation. Please also note that the script suggests a way to backup, automating it further is up to you!

[Mark Winston]

Hi @Prince Nyeche 

Thank you for your reply, however it is still unclear how to do automated backups of confluence cloud when you also have jira. Am I missing something?  There appears to only be an option to back up the site, however you cannot restore it if you have jira.

I'm sure many companies that use confluence cloud with Jira have come up with a solution to solve this, so I'm surprised I couldn't find any help articles outline and how to do it.  Can someone please share how they are doing this?

Just brainstorming some ideas, I imagine a solution could involve either backing up the spaces individually, however I don't know how to do this.

Alternatively, can I back up the entire site and then restore it on a completely separate demo instance without jira, then export the spaces, and then import those spaces into my confluence site with jira. 

Are either of these approaches on the right track?

Thank you for your help.

[Prince Nyeche]

Hey @Mark Winston 

Yes that's the only option with the API endpoint to backup everything. it seems you've gotten the alternative while brainstorming with the backup restore to another confluence only instance; besides that approach. If you can code, you can use a Web UI Automation module like Selenium and create an automated script that will download the Space by Space export without any Atlassian API (this is another approach). However that means, you will need to know and code the script that will do such.

[Mark Winston]

@Prince Nyeche Thank you so much for your help. 

It is a shame this isn't documented better.  I feel like I'm reinventing the wheel.  

[Mark Winston]

@Dario B and @Stephen Sifers any thoughts?

Thanks for your help!

[Dario B]

Hi @Mark Winston ,

A possible workaround is to restore the backup into a temporary Confluence Server instance and then use the Confluence Cloud Migration Assistant to migrate the needed spaces into the desired instance. 

Another option is to use the Confluence Command Line Interface (CLI):

• How to export multiple spaces using Confluence Command Line Interface (CLI)
• How to import multiple spaces using Confluence Command Line Interface (CLI)

I know this is not optimal and I am thinking on other possible ways to do to.

Cheers,
Dario

[Mark Winston]

Thanks @Dario B - since it sounds like you've looked at these options, what would be your preference/recommendation for setting up automated backups 1) Using these bash Scripts or 2) using the Confluence Command Line Interface (CLI) tool?  Have you looked at them both? Thanks for any advice you may have.  Don't worry, I'm not looking for Atlassian's official stance on this.  I'm just looking for your personal opinion based on your experience using these tool to help steer my efforts :-)

Thanks,

Mark

[Dario B]

Hello @Mark Winston ,

Let's start by saying that it depends a bit on the involved scenario. :)

However, generally speaking, being a paid tool Confluence Command Line Interface (CLI) provides more functionalities and flexibility: you can export all spaces or only a subset of them and you have tons of other commands/actions available to manage or migrate your Confluence, as listed in below page.

• https://bobswift.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/CSOAP/pages/10584068/Reference 

However, there are also scenarios in which the scripts are more than enough:

• having a Confluence only site, so that you can import full backups with no issues
• having only  few active spaces, so that you can import the full backup into a temporary/evaluation Cloud site (do not use free or you might lose permissions) and then only export/import the needed space back into the source site, etc. 

I hope this helps.

Cheers,
Dario

[Maria Korolenko]

@Mark Winston 

Hi Mark!

We at Rewind are considering building automated backups for Confluence and Jira Could. You’ll be able to backup and restore your Confluence workspace.

I’m wondering is it what you want to see in Confluence automated backups? I would love to hear from you! 

If you're interested in joining our waitlist, feel free to register https://rewind.com/products/backups/confluence/

[Vish]

Hello @Mark Winston @Dario B @Maria Korolenko @Prince Nyeche 

I want to get your view on the scenarios for data backup of Confluence cloud.

Scenario 1 - Disaster scenario where Atlassian looses the data  - could be some of the data or all

What other scenarios would be applicable? Given confluence supports versioning of pages.

 Thank you 

[Michael Portnoy]

This scenario already happened!

[Tristan Fesmire]

This thread has aged well...

[Aresky Bandera]

lol