backup - why bother, who cares, how much

[Deleted user]

Hi, if you can share your opinion regarding JIRA backup for JIRA Software operation, that would be very helpful !

Assuming we have platform level backup and application level backup, what would be the ideal way to pursue both ?

my thoughts -

why we need backup, what for ? 

system automatically done backup for us at all? how to make sure we have everything we need if system crash :-( ?

database backup , how often ?

application level, is that the 'zip' in export folder we aim for ?   seems like that's one for all solution, can we break down to project level at all ?

jira admin should not handle the system (app, db, web) admin jobs, shouldn't he/she ? better separated , what do you think ?

[miikhy]

Hi,

A lot of questions for a tricky topic :)

Backups are obviously an important part of your data security strategy. You can enable automatic backups from Jira directly on a defined frequency, In my opinion that's a good option as long as you ensure the frequency is making sense, the time of execution is well chosen and disk space won,t suffer from it.

The database backup is not necessary as backups are basically Database extracts converted into XML with a few additions. That being said, it's always a good idea to get a database backup even though the restore might be difficult on a fresh install due to server id changing.

Depending on the criticality of your Jira data, the strategy must clearly be adapted! You're finally asking an interesting question regarding the responsibilities. If you have system admins, they have the responsibility to secure your application and server backups but they'll need access and confidence in Jira. I do think that the collaboration between admins and sysadmin is the success key for this question.

My main industries are banking and finance so I can tell you the backuping strategy can be critical and what I've seen most is daily application backup with data redundancy with an extra virtual machine backup + database backup. It's a bit of an overkill for SMEs but is definitely the most secure from my experience.

That's my 5 cents, hope this will help!

Cheers

[Deleted user]

Thank you so much! @miikhy  !  Love your 5 cents !! and big help indeed. 

I appreciate your sharing. 

There are quite a few of zip files under export, like 2017-Dec-07--1900.zip ,  but how can control what time to trigger the backup, can I give certain condition to kick off one ? 

obviously, those like 2017-Dec-07--1900.zip is by system itself, but I don't know how to adjust them, either. :-(

[miikhy]

Glad it helped.

You can change the Backup service delay as described in this KB: https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjiraserver071/automating-jira-application-backups-802592966.html

The default value is 1440mns (24 hrs). You can change it for any frequence which you'd like.

Unfortunately you can't choose the time of the backup but that's a first step!

Hope this helps!

[Deleted user]

Thank you again!  Yes, appreciate your instructions.  Let me adjust a bit to see how it goes :-)  What a nice Friday!  Many thanks.

[Deleted user]

by the way, interesting, I see some twins in that export folder, don't know why, like same size of xml backup file for now, but different time, not 24 hours in between though.