Backup & Restore Requirements - building a better experience!

[#1]

Hello community members!!

As the Product Manager responsible for data management in our cloud, one area of focus for me is improving our backup & restore capabilities.  Particularly as it relates to any of the following:

• Companies with large amounts of data in our cloud
• Companies in any regulated industry with compliance and/or audit requirements
• Companies with heavy internal policy requirements for data retention

If your company falls in any of those categories, or you have previous experience of the needs of companies in this area - I'd like to start to create a group that would be interested in part of our design, MVP, EAP process as we build and improve this experience in our cloud.

I'd love to hear about:

• your experience with our current Backup Manager capabilities for Jira and/or Confluence.  
• What your requirements are internally or externally for long term data storage
• What does an audit request look like for you (what form does it take, what type of data do you need to go digging for, and how would you have to present that data to the auditors or regulating bodies)
• What your expectations are around data restoration (not talking about disaster recovery, but more around end-user/admin data deletion/overwrites that are destructive)
• Any other requirements or needs for backing up and/or restoring your data from/in/to our cloud

Thanks! And if you have any questions on this topic, feel free to ask away

[wkennedy]

One of the biggest challenges facing my Cloud projects is the mandate to have a Production replica that is more or less in sync with the live site.

There is currently a rocky path to make the data available in either a Sandbox or Developer instance, where the unencrypted zip is considered highly confidential IP.

As it is, I'm waiting to evaluate CMJ and Project Configurator, but I would hope for a more direct (and secure) path to get Prod data in sync with our other environment.

It's a hike:

• Generate backup zip
• Manually download the unencrypted zip - dozens of gigabytes in size
• Store it (securely)
• Unzip it
• Re-zip the XML and data/ separately
• Manually re-upload those zip files

A thought: what if these files went directly into and out of Bitbucket instead?

[RJ Gazarek]

@wkennedy thanks for the feedback!  What's interesting about that is, you (and many customers) are using a tool for a purpose other than it was built for.  Meaning, generating a backup, is not necessarily the right tool for keeping data in sync (it is our recommended practice because we haven't had a great alternative).  I know our teams are making progress on our sandbox environments, and (I believe but don't quote me) being able to migrate production data to your sandbox environment with a single click is on that list.  I'm not sure where they are with that but can see if I can get the PM for that to come in here and comment on it. 

Outside of production data being kept in sync, what needs does your company have with respect to backup/restore functionality of your production data itself?

[wkennedy]

Hi @RJ Gazarek we have different avenues available in Server and Data Center. This Cloud export is the recommended solution until the teams behind the Sandbox make Production Data import available. Is there something I can watch in JAC? 

Backup/restore requirements vary by project/customer/industry but almost everybody wants incrementals.

[Matt Tse]

Hey @wkennedy,

My team is responsible for the cloud sandbox experience. We're currently working on data copying, which will allow customers to copy their production data over to the sandbox. We just started rolling out copying for Jira and are working on Confluence now. To stay on top of the progress, I'd suggest following this JAC ticket: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CLOUD-11102.

As an aside, we're also working on a host of other things to help customers manage change better in cloud. If you're interested in this topic, I'd encourage you to join our community group here if you haven't already.

Cheers,

Matt

[wkennedy]

I actually commented on that ticket some days ago. I'm tracking it and have encouraged many in the community to do the same: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/william-j-kennedy_wondering-what-atlassian-cloud-issues-are-activity-6760780444117147648-dayy