Jira Cloud - Restore Issues & Site from Backup

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Whether you need to restore a Jira Cloud backup in order to perform some testing or to recover lost information, the process is straight froward and can be easily completed by and Cloud Administrator. There are a few things to watch-out for depending on what platform you are working on but I call them out in this document.

A Jira Cloud / Site Backup is needed in order to complete the steps covered within this article.

This process WILL OVER-WRITE all existing data.

A video of these steps with a demonstration has been included for those that enjoy the show-me experience. There are also links to Atlassian's official documentation for those admin that want to go straight to the source.

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Jira Cloud - Restore Issues & Site from Backup

Preparing the Backup Media

1. Expand (unzip) the backup file previously created and create two new .zip files for import. One for Data and one for Media. While this step is not required, with larger backups, imports can run the risk of timing out. Atlassian recommends this method as the best way to import.
   • Add the active objects.xml & entities.xml file to a new archive (.zip) file called Data-Import.
   • Add all objects in the data folder to a new archive (.zip) file called Media-Import. If the data folder is large (> 5GB) Split the data file into small archives. I don't cover this in the video but it is explained in Atlassian's documentation which is linked below.
2. MAC users will need to complete and extra step in order to remove the MAC specific files from the Archives. Use these two commands in order to accomplish this. More detail can be found in the video linked below as well as Atlassian's own documentation.

   • zip -d filename.zip __MACOSX/\*
     
     zip -d filename.zip \*/.DS_Store

Importing the prepared backup files

Import the Data file before the Media file!

1. Navigate to your Atlassian Cloud Jira and login with Admin level credentials.
2. Navigate to your Jira Application.
3. Click on Settings (the gear in the upper right-hand corner) and then select System from the menu that opens.
4. Select Restore System located under the the Import & Export Heading located in the left most column.
5. Click the Import Data button and select the Data file that was prepared in the previous section.
6. Once the file has been checked, click the Run Import button to begin the import.
   • You can also disable outgoing mail (this is a nice thing to do ).
7. Select Restore System located under the the Import & Export Heading located in the left most column.
8. Click the Import Media button and select the Data file that was prepared in the previous section.
9. Once the file has been checked, click the Run Import button to begin the import.

After Import Steps

1. Verify the Import. Make sure everything is as expected.
2. Check to make sure that all groups have access to the application.

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See How It's Done

Jira Cloud - Restore Issues & Site from Backup 

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Read It For Yourself

Import Issues 

How to import only part of a Jira export into Jira Cloud 

[Krista Stellar]

Knowing that the full site import for Jira migrations from server to cloud is going away shortly, I'm wondering if that change affects the process to restore issues and site from backup?

I ask because the steps outlined to Restore System are the same ones used as part of the full site migration (you prepare the backup on server and restore backup on cloud).