BCP solution options on Atlassian cloud

[Mit Tolia]

Hi All - we are working on an Atlassian cloud migration and wanted to explore how others in the community have approached in designing a Business Continuity Plan - BCP solution, once the move to cloud has happened

Am aware that Atlassian does offer a DR mechanism in place where if the cloud site goes down, there is a fallback mechanism so that site is up & running.

What are the other options to leverage & consider, to ensure that the business critical data from the cloud is always accessible - via backups? via excel/csv exports? some other custom solution?

[Danny Grenzowski _Rewind_]

Hey @Mit Tolia, my team at Rewind built an automated backup and restore solution for Jira Cloud for DR purposes. It's hosted on a separate, secure cloud too, so that in the case of a Jira outage your backups are still accessible.

Try it free for 7 days on the Atlassian Marketplace:

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1226389/

[Sanket Parlikar _Revyz_]

Hello @Mit Tolia 

As one of the BCP strategies, you may want to look at 3rd party app for backup and restore of Atlassian Cloud apps. Revyz offers data protection for Jira Software Cloud with Confluence Cloud on roadmap.

[Mit Tolia]

Thanks @Sanket Parlikar _Revyz_  - I suspect we will start to look at 3rd party solutions in greater detail at some point in time, but, with any 3rd party apps there would need to be a thorough due diligence to ensure all the security & compliance elements are covered off with any options we consider - that in itself will be a lengthy and time consuming exercise, hence first exploring what can be achieved by & around the Atlassian core functionality 

[Saralie S.]

@Sanket Parlikar _Revyz_     Please review our guidelines for Marketplace and Solution Partners , specifically: 

• Identify yourself as a partner: Make sure the user is aware you are affiliated with a partner company; for example, by placing the name of your company in your user name in {curly brackets} or -dashes- 

Please disclose your association to the marketplace app you've linked and update your profile!

[Petter Gonçalves]

Hello @Mit Tolia

Thank you for reaching out.

As you mentioned, Atlassian indeed has a DR mechanism that keeps all customer's data safe and restorable at any time, however, this mechanism can only be triggered for outages or issues on the Atlassian application side.

In other words, we can not trigger this mechanism for specific sites when the root cause of the data loss is on the customer side. E.g:

1. Issues or pages deleted by users
2. Manual reset of Atlassian site by the organization admin
3. Deleted components by an application user in general (Projects, Workflows, etc)

We provide the following methods to prevent or restore the data for those scenarios:

1 - Granular permission levels:

These settings allow the organization admin to prevent users that are unfamiliar with the Jira structure from accidentally deleting data.

Besides the administration levels (Organization and product admins), you can also restrict specific users from deleting Jira issues or Confluence pages in a granular way.

2 - Allow the generation and restore of application backup from the client side:

Both Jira and Confluence provide a tool that you can use to properly export data to an XML file containing all the site details, which can be imported back to an Atlassian site at any time. This tool is very useful to create daily backups for wide-open Atlassian instances that allow access to a big number of individuals, where the risk of accidental data deletion might be high.

You can check the links below for more information:

Create a site backup - Confluence

Create a site backup - Jira 

For now, neither of the backup tools mentioned above can be automatically scheduled directly from the application, however, you can easily build an external script to do that.

3 - The CSV and JSON options

Finally, you can use CSV and JSON exports to properly backup your data. The problem with this approach is that some features and components are not included in those backups, while others are not supported. E.g:

1. Issue History
2. Some team-managed project details (Jira)
3. Some application links

Let us know if you have any questions.

[Ed Letifov _TechTime - New Zealand_]

@Petter Gonçalves 

As far as I am aware currently it's impossible to import Confluence data as a whole site from the backup that the same Confluence allows you to make, you can only import individual spaces.

As such suggesting this as a viable option for backup is *extremely* misleading.

[Mit Tolia]

Thanks @Petter Gonçalves  & @Ed Letifov _TechTime - New Zealand_  for sharing your perspectives and some options to consider.

I'd agree as that was going to be my follow-on question from this response to understand if there are any known constraints to be aware of, especially when one tries to restore the backup - Jira & Confluence.

We are working in an environment which is highly regulated, hence need to clearly articulate some of these aspects to make an informed decision

[Petter Gonçalves]

Hey @Ed Letifov _TechTime - New Zealand_

Thank you for your feedback and sorry if my last message was not clear, however, I kindly disagree with your last statement. Please, allow me to go a little deeper into your statement so we can confirm we are on the same page:

As far as I am aware currently it's impossible to import Confluence data as a whole site from the backup that the same Confluence allows you to make, you can only import individual spaces.

Actually, the backup from Confluence containing all the spaces can be fully imported to other Confluence sites. The limitation you mentioned only applies if the destination site also has Jira under the same Organization - We even have a public feature request to fix this limitation:

Provide functionality to import Confluence Cloud site when Atlassian Cloud site has Jira 

Considering the fact above, I don't see this limitation as a blocker as it can be avoided with simple steps. Allow me to provide some scenarios:

A space or page was deleted and needs to be restored:

Having the full site backup, you can fix that by following the steps below:

1. Sign-up for a new Confluence Cloud site - free trial
2. Import your backup to the new site
3. Export the deleted space and import it back to your original Confluence site

The Confluence site was deleted, together with all of your Confluence spaces

Having the full site backup, you can fix that by following the steps below:

1. Sign-up for a new Confluence site - free trial
2. Import your backup to the new site
3. Optionally, transfer the product/site to your original organization, so your Confluence site can be under the same organization as your Jira site
   
   P.S: Another limitation that can happen here would be if the backup file exceeds 200 MB (Not considering attachments). Although you must have a giant environment to achieve this limit, you can also work around this limitation by importing your site to a data center instance instead of Cloud and using the Cloud migration assistant to run the import to Cloud, which does not have the limit of 200 MB.
   We recommend exporting a backup to Server as well to ensure this workaround can be implemented.

As such suggesting this as a viable option for backup is *extremely* misleading.

I believe that exporting the site's full backup within a time range is not only viable but the best option to ensure your Confluence data is secure, as it can be imported at any time to a Confluence site and have its data properly restored.

Please, let me know if you have a different opinion.

[Mit Tolia]

Hi @Petter Gonçalves - circling back on this again. In your initial response, you did mention that for option 2 (generating a backup of Jira & Confluence), an external automated script could be written - any chance you could point me to some ideas/posts/articles that I might be able to reference?

Also, is it possible to generate single page or specific space level exports from the cloud instance to xml format (or other formats too) via Confluence REST APIs? - The reason why I ask about this option is that if the customer has got large amounts of data - the back up generation itself would take too long, hence exploring if only some business critical elements (like some specific confluence spaces or data updated in Jira in last 3 months) could only be backed up automatically & regularly via REST APIs?

[Petter Gonçalves]

Hey @Mit Tolia

Thank you for bringing this up. I have good news regarding the backup automation export for Jira and Confluence:

Atlassian is currently developing the feature to automate backups for both Jira and Confluence directly from the UI, although this functionality might take some time to get deployed. You can check our progress in the following feature request:

Automatic Backup generation in Backup Manager 

Feel free to vote and watch the suggestion to receive updates and increase its priority.

For now, we suggest the following options:

1. Access the link below and click on the "Send request to join" button. Once you are able to access the group, provide your current scenario there and our PMs will reach out and guide you with the steps to automate your backup:
   https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Backup-Restore/gh-p/backupandrestore
2. Take a look at the workaround section of the feature request and check if the provided scripts work for you.

Regarding your second question, I'm afraid Jira and Confluence do not have specific APIs (At least, not of public use) to export only a particular set of information (spaces, updated issues, etc), however, I recommend including this request when contacting our PMs in the Community group. They may know any background API that could help you achieve your scenario.

Let us know if this information helps.