Archiving JIRA

[Pangianto Pang]

Hi is there anyway to archieve JIRA?

Our JIRA is growing very fast and soon the server will run out of harddisk space :(.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

That's a bit of a minefield at the moment. There is no formal or proper way to do it.

You do have a couple of choice to make to begin with

1) You could wait until Atlassian come up with an archiving solution - I know they're working on it, and have been for a while, but I've no idea whether it will be ready

2) You need to analyse your archiving requirements to get a feel for what you're going to need.

A problem here is that "archive" is a bit vague, and your approach depends on the details of the problem you're trying to solve. My answer 1 might be utterly useless to you. A good start is that you've said "disk space", but even that needs questioning - database disk space? Attachments? The working directories other than attachments? "Archive to save disk space" has several different possible answers based on which areas of disk you are running low on!

[Pangianto Pang]

Apparently, the JIRA application files are consuming the hard disk space because the database is at a different server.

It will be good; if we can archieve issues by date rather then a project because the projects are still being used by users.

The offline archieving is archieving unused project right?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "Jira application files". To be clear, there are several piles of files you need to consider

• There are files that make up the application. These do NOT change size unless you upgrade, reconfigure, redeploy or add plugins and are relatively small to begin with. (When you say "application files", these are the ones I think of, but that's just the way I think in English)
• There are some temporary files created and destroyed by the application and the java virtual machine - they'll vary in size, but generally are very small and are removed regularly anyway.
• There are log files - these will grow constantly, but most systems are set up with some housekeeping
• There is an index - this will grow in proportion to the number of issues you have in Jira. It only shrinks when you delete issues (note - "online" archiving does NOT delete issues, so it won't improve this)
• There is the database - that is quite complex to work out storage for, although as a general rule, it's like the index - more issues = larger files. As you've got it on a separate server, I don't think you need worry about that.
• There are attachments - this grows according to what people attach or remove - users can delete attachments (they rarely bother) and deleting an issue will delete it's attachments.

You need to identify which one, or several, of these is causing the issue with disk space. However,

• You can rule out the "application" files because they don't grow.
• You can't do anything about the temporary files because things stop working without them
• You've already eliminated the database

So, you need to consider the index, the logs and the attachments. By default, they are all in the "jira home directory", unless you've moved them, so you can simply look at the sizes of those three directories to find out what the problem is...

Finally, not quite. Offline archiving a copy of all the data at the time you run the export, and you can retrieve from it.

[Florin Manaila]

Hi,

Take alook at this under "Offline Archiving":

https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Archiving+a+Project