How to sync between two non-connected Jira instances working on the same project at the same time?

[Michael Morris]

I have two separate Jira instances (on different physical servers/locations) and I would like to have the two fully synchronized on a weekly basis. These instances cannot be network connected, so I need to do manual file-based export/import of all projects bidirectionally.

The instances will have their own 'primary' projects, but will also need to collaborate on certain shared projects (e.g. project 1 below).

Instance A works on: Project 1, 2, 3 (not 4, 5)

Instance B works on: Project 4, 5, 1 (not 2, 3)

The majority of the time, they will be updating their own specific projects (2,3 + 4,5), but will occasionally each update project 1. Both instances need to see all combined projects.

Question 1: What is the best way to sync/copy the non-shared projects (2,3,4,5) between the two? Can I frequently export/import them on a regular basis?

Question 2: What will happen if both instances have made a change to the same task in a project during the in-between sync period (i.e. instance A marks Task1 as in progress, and instance B updates Task1's description or adds a comment)?

This question is the same for BitBucket and Confluence. If the answer here is positive, I'll re-post in the respective topics.

[Liset de Bruin _K15t_ · Accepted solution]

Hi Michael,

I don’t know an out-of-the-box feature of Jira (or confluence and Bitbucket) that support this use case. However, an issue synchronization app can help you out here as they will take care of synchronizing the issues. I can recommend Backbone Issue Sync, but I might be slightly biased here as I’m working for the Backbone team ;)

I did wonder what exactly you meant with “both instances need to see all combined projects”, do you want to synchronize projects 4 and 5 to the instance B project 1 as well?

Anyhow, to give you an example about how Backbone works: if you want to synchronize project 1 from instance A to instance B you can set up a synchronization between projects with file exchange by connecting both systems to the same file exchange or you can carry over the data using a USB stick or using another similar way. This way the networks don’t need to be able to connect. More information about this distributed set up can be found here.

Other than that, you can set how often the issue has to be synced yourself, our default would be 5 seconds, but a week is possible as well of course. If edits are made on both sides, Backbone will check out the newest change and synchronize that.

Cheers,
Liset

[Michael Morris]

Thanks Liset, Backbone sync does seem to offer what I'm after for Jira issues. I like that it can be done via USB, and that it looks for changes between the two and takes the latest one.

I'll investigate the Backbone option further with the 30-day free trial.

p.s. regarding your question "I did wonder what exactly you meant with “both instances need to see all combined projects”, do you want to synchronize projects 4 and 5 to the instance B project 1 as well?".

I want both instances to have up-to-date copies of projects 1-5, although they'll likely only be both working on project 1 at the same time.

[Yanjie_Fang]

I am wondering how Project1 can manage its issue-ID in between instance A and B?

Say when a new issue raised in A and at the same time another new issue raised in B, will they get the same new issue-ID respectively and cause trouble in the synchronization later on?