Our attachments vanished

[christopher.farr]

I have a project named DATA in Jira Software (Server) 8.1.0

The path where attachments were stored ...

E:\Program Files\Atlassian\Application Data\JIRA\data\attachments\DATA\10000

... had 230 sub-folders for our issues: DATA-2, DATA-9, DATA-11, DATA-13, etc.

Today, there are only 20 sub-folders! 210 sub-folders simply vanished.

For almost all of our attachments (mainly images), we now get the following error message, for example:

Ouch! We can't load the image.
/secure/attachment/10009/Snag_1f1e6854.png

Two questions:

1. What could have caused this? How do we prevent in future?

2. How can I restore our attachments from backup?

We backup the following directory which contains the attachments:

E:\Program Files\Atlassian\Application Data\JIRA\data

Can we just copy-and-paste this directory for example into the appropriate location?

Thanks in advance for any help.

Chris

[Italo Qualisoni [e-Core] · Accepted solution]

Hi @christopher.farr ,

Great that you have backups to restore the data!

1- That's strange, I've never seen this kind of issue. I'll bring some questions that might help you to track the reason, you don't need to reply it in this thread if it doesn't make sense

• When did the team notice this issue?
• Any log in atlassian-jira.log or catalina.out during the possible issue time-frame?
• Have any change being made to the environment during this time-frame?
  • maybe a new JIRA app, some hardware change or setting
• Did it happen to this specific project? If so we can say that this has been scoped to DATA project
• Do you have some automation that purge old attachments?
  • Some sort of script, in house development or automation rule?
  • Or have some development going on to do it? I know that some apps allow scripting and it would be technical possible to delete the file from the file system using it.

2- Technically if the attachment have not being deleted through the application, it will still have the reference to its attachments in the database. Based on your error message this seems your case. Therefore you can just restore the file from your backup following the same file system structure and the files will return to your issue, you can restore one specific issue's attachment and then check in the browser for the attachments.

[christopher.farr]

Thanks so much for your response. The only thing we did was changed the permissions of our E: drive at one point. Not sure if it was coincident with the Jira problem. Previously, you had to be admin to write to it. We changed it so anyone could write to it. More permissive so don't think this should have caused anything.

I will try to copy-and-paste those sub-folders and see what happens. Thanks again!

Chris

[Italo Qualisoni [e-Core]]

@christopher.farr 

How was your progress on that?

[christopher.farr]

I copied-and-pasted the files from backup and worked! Good. Still don't know about root cause but will chalk that up to one of life's mysteries :-) Thanks again. Chris