Jira upgrade from 5.0.7 to 6.4.11

[Jeffrey Melies]

Can anyone tell me if it's possible to upgrade from 5.0.7 directly to 6.4.11, or would I need to install other version to make this step?

Any additional information or issues I may encounter would be very much appreciated.

[Paulo Hennig]

Hello Jeff,

You can upgrade from 5.0.7 to 6.4.11 directly (With one go). You can use the following guide for this:

https://confluence.atlassian.com/jira/upgrading-jira-185729508.html

[Benito Picarelli]

Hi Jeff,

Yes, JIRA should be able to convert it all just fine! 

Cheers

[Jeffrey Melies]

Thank you both, let me ask another question, this one may be a little far fetched.  We are currently running Windows Server 2008 R2 OS and we're hoping it would be possible to start off with a new MS 2012 OS, complete a "New" install of JIRA 6.4.11, and complete a system restore using the data from JIRA 5.0.7, would JIRA be able to convert it okay, or has anyone attempted this?

[crf]

Current versions of JIRA should be capable of upgrading from as early as 4.0.  (This is three major releases and more than six years ago, so I think we are being rather generous, here ).  Not only should the direct path work, but it is probably a better idea than trying to go in steps in most cases.

When you upgrade to a newer JIRA, there is usually a series of "upgrade tasks" that it has to run to change the shape of its data.  For example, there were several that forced the storage of usernames into lowercase in 6.0 as part of the ability to rename users.  There is a small risk trade-off between older and newer releases here: On one hand, the closer the upgrade task runs to the version of the code it was built with, the less risk that things have changed in some way that confuses it.  On the other hand, if the original version of an upgrade task had a problem, then we may have identified and corrected that problem in later versions of JIRA, and you would miss out on these improvements by making a pit stop at an older version.

We have tests and best practices for how to write these upgrade tasks in a way that makes them unlikely to degrade without us noticing before it gets to you, so for the most part, I think this risk trade-off favours going with the most recent version available.