Manual backup of Jira home directory is taking too long

[Rehnuma Noor]

Hello,

I'm currently in the process of upgrading Jira server from version 7.9 to 8.11 and am setting up my staging environment in a separate server. I'm facing an issue with zipping up my production Jira home directory as a back up - it seems to be taking a very long time. The largest folder in there is the Attachments (approx. 80 GB). I've provided a screen capture of stats in my production environment.

Is there another way around this? What folders would I actually need to back up in order to create the staging environment?

[Michael Johnson · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Not sure if this is an option for you but we just backup our Production database and restore it to our Test environment. Change a few settings to the Test values and robocopy over the attachments directory, and that's not even really necessary. You can add new attachments for UAT'ing the upgrade.

Probably should have mentioned that we use a MS SQL DB.

Best, Michael J

[Rehnuma Noor]

Hi Michael,

Thanks for your reply.

I most definitely will be taking a db dump but I've read in a few places that Attachments do not get saved in the database, therefore a manual backup is always a good idea. Additionally, I'd prefer to have the Attachments because I'm upgrading to an interim version (8.2) which involves SQL upgrade.

I've never done a robocopy so not sure if there are limitations.

[Michael Johnson]

Hi Rehnuma,

That's correct, attachments are saved in the file system. You should be fine just backing up the <home> directory and copying to your TEST system.

Ours is stored at:

<home>\Atlassian\Application Data\JIRA\data\attachments

Robocopy is a Microsoft command line tool that makes copying files and directories a bit easier. I mean you can always copy/paste as well.

Hope that helps.

Best, Michael J

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/robocopy

https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjiraserver073/jira-application-home-directory-861253888.html

[Rehnuma Noor]

Thank you, Michael. I requested my windows admin team to copy the file over which took approximately 20 minutes.

I haven't tried the robocopy for this case but it worked for moving other files around. Appreciate the feedback!