Jira Software 4.3.3 to latest version of JIRA?

[Deleted user]

Hi, 

We have an old Jira Software version (4.3.3) installed and we would like to upgrade to lastest version. Please guide me how can i procced.

Thanks,

[Łukasz Modzelewski _Lumo_ · Accepted solution]

Hi @[deleted] ,

Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

Upgrading from such low version will be challenging, a lot of things have changed. Current version is 9.5.0, while Jira 4.3.0 was released 16.03.2011 :D (at that time I didn't even know Jira existed)

Start with a backup ;) 

Go through release and upgrade notes, then plan and test your upgrade.

https://confluence.atlassian.com/jira/jira-release-summary-159154300.html 

https://confluence.atlassian.com/jira/all-jira-upgrade-guides-version-3-x-and-later-162432194.html

Along the way you will probably have to make some decisions eg. about archiving some of the old projects.

You can reach our to some local Partner for assistance (paid): https://partnerdirectory.atlassian.com/ 

Cheers,
Łukasz

PS. For fun, with backups and testing environment prepared I would check what would happen if I try to upgrade to that latest version, then I would be check 'problems' with this approach.

PS2. If you need only data (issues) to be persistent in new instance, maybe some .csv export & import of issues would be sufficient

[Deleted user]

Hi Łukasz,

Thank you for your response, yes it will be challenging task :-) thank you for the suggestion I will review provide links and create a test environment to rollout the upgrades 

thanks,

Azim

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

As well as what @Łukasz Modzelewski _Lumo_ said, you must prepare yourself for multiple upgrades, and on two systems.

You must go through stepped upgrades here, you can't just jump to the latest version.  In this case, I would strongly recommend upgrading 4.3 -> 5.2 -> 6.4 -> 7.0 -> 7.13 -> 9.5

Yes, I've left out 8.x - the upgrade to 9 can be done from relatively high versions of 7.x but if you have any problems with 7.13 -> 9.5, you might want to add in an 8.22 step.

You may also find you can skip 5.2 or 6.4, but whatever you do there, do not skip the upgrade to 7.0 from the previous version - later versions of 7, 8 and 9 still have bugs in the upgrade process that breaks some of your data.  There's no data loss, but you end up have to do a load of messing in the database to enable some of the new functions in 7.7 and above.

The second system you are going to need to upgrade is your database server, the one running behind Jira as a data store.  Jira 4 only supports some quite old versions of the four databases Jira uses, and at some point in your upgrade path, support for your current database is going to go away.  As an example, Jira 9 will only work with MySQL  8, but (from memory) Jira 5.2 only works with MySql 5.

[Deleted user]

Hi @Nic Brough -Adaptavist-,

Thank you for your detail response.

As suggested I will be creating a separate testing environment and rollout upgrades one by one to avoid any kind on data lose.

Thanks,

Azim