Archiving Jira to an archive instance

[Ray Widaman]

My team is looking for a solution for our JIRA instance where we can archive issues from it to an archive JIRA instance.  We are doing this as our Jira instance has grown very large and we need to limit the number of issues it holds and still have the older issues available for review and audit purposes.

Archiving criteria

1. Bulk archive issues from all projects that are older than X date, move them to Archive Jira instance
2. Ticket metadata, attachments…etc should move with the ticket.
3. Process can be run on a scheduled basis, nightly/weekly

Atlassian’s solution to backup/restore won’t work for us due to the requirements above.   I’ve found other posts on this community with closely similar topics but I have not found any solutions yet that would meet our criteria.

Thanks,

Ray

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Jira does not yet have any useful way to do this, even with swathes of add-ons.

At best, you could use an xml backup plus configuration-copying add-ons to copy a project from production to an archive when the project has ended, but that's as far as it goes. 

[Deleted user]

Hi Ray,

Have you considered using a third-party add-on for this? Configuration Manager for Jira supports project archiving use case. Hope this helps!

If you have any further questions, ping me.

P.S.: If you end up using CMJ and want to use it only for archiving purposes, keep in mind there is an option for weekly/monthly license. 

Cheers,

Bianka

[Steve Bromley (javapgmr)]

Bianka,

What's a good email that we can contact you at.  I'm part of Ray's team and we are all researching this together.  I'd like to send you what our requirements are.

Steve

[Deleted user]

Hi Steve,

Feel free to ping me at bianka.banova@botronsoft.com 

Cheers,

Bianka 

[Hua Soon SIM _Akeles_]

We are the developer of the Issue Archiver for Jira plugin and there is an existing Jira ticket for it (JRASERVER-5843).

Yes, it is a very very very tough problem to solve.  

I can give an example:

• There is a select Custom field called "System" which has the option values A, B and C with the id 1,2 and 3 respectively
• The issues with option C are archived 
• After 2 years, the JIRA admin sees that option C is not used and there is no issues with option C in the PROD server. So he decides to rename option C as D
• The new issues with option D are sync over with id = 3
• So the archive issues with option C are updated with option D 

In order to perform such an archival setup without any conflicts, the changes in the live server always needs to reconcile with the settings in the archive server.

That's the reason why we came up with our solution for Atlassian Codegeist 2017.

[Hua Soon SIM _Akeles_]

There is a workaround mentioned in one of the comments from (JRASERVER-5843).

An alternate workaround we have found as TAMs is to use an issue sync plugin called Exalate. You can "exalate" selected issues from the production instance to an archive instance which will sync/create copies of the issues to the archive instance. You can then "Unexalate" it to remove the one-one link between synced issues and then delete the original issues from the production instance.

Essentially you can sync the issues to an archiving issues and then delete the issues from the instance in use. The advantage of Exalate is that you can sync the issues moved to the archived instance back to the production instance if necessary.

[Bryan Bai]

there have 2 part comes with archive:

• metadata (information from database)
• attachment (from hard-disk)

there no clear "archive" conception from JIRA and the only way is, you keep regular backup of instance or dedicated project (we are using project configurator) then delete ticket and attachment from PROD.

but this is also have issue, when you really want to "restore". it will be very hard to restore and merge back to PROD, because the progress of JIRA instance version.

actually, I would bother to archive JIRA issue at all. we have project ~ 1,000,000 issues, and 40GB attachment. I just regular clean up old attachment, because disk capacity, but don't do issue archive.

hope this help.

[Claudio Ombrella]

Hi @Ray Widaman may I know how large is your instance? In our organisation we have 2.1 million with 6TB of attachments. 

Let me know I may have some tricks but need to know how large is your system.