Restoring A Backup XML File

[Sidney Badier]

We have been trialing Confluence over the last two weeks and have just bought a subscription. Today we did a backup creating the XML backup file. So that we could reuse all the work we did doing the trial period.

After we restored it on the Confluence Server all the users were overwritten. What is the procedure to prevent this and other environment settings from being overwritten after a restore of a space?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Restoring a full backup is supposed to restore everything.

If you only want to import content, then you can take space exports and restore those.

Thing is though, you don't need to.  A trial system is the same as a production system, it just stops working when the trial expires.  Add a production licence to it, and it will become your production system.  You don't need to restore anything at all.

[Shannon S]

Hi Sidney,

Restoring a full site backup will overwrite all content in your Confluence database, including settings and users.

Alternatively, if you restore a space export, this will not overwrite your users or Confluence settings.

From your description it seemed that you were trying to restore the Confluence instance but you also mentioned in your last paragraph that you were restoring a space only. If your users were overwritten then it may have been that you inadvertently restored a full site backup, so you will want to verify that by having a look at that file.

If you want to avoid having your users overwritten, one way to do that would be to change the primary User Directory to something other than the one that has your users, and then switch it back after the restore. i.e. LDAP vs Internal, Jira, etc.

There is no way to avoid writing over your settings when restoring a full site backup.

Kind regards,

Shannon

[Shannon S]

Another workaround would be to individually restore each of your Confluence spaces, instead of the whole site. This would recover your data but not bring over users, settings, Calendars, etc.

Kind regards,

Shannon

[Sidney Badier]

Thanks Nic and Shannon for your help. Confluence is great.