Sign up for the Early Access Program of the revamped Backup & Restore for Confluence & Jira!

[#1]

Hello everyone! Chiming in on this group to raise additional interest in our Early Access Program for New Confluence & Jira Backup/Restore now that we are close to releasing restore capabilities for Confluence.

Scroll down for more details and the link to sign up!

Before I go over the details - a quick introduction: I'm Steven Bao, a Product Manager on the Confluence Cloud team that focuses on migrations (namely Server to Cloud and Cloud to Cloud use cases like Backup/Restore, Sandbox, Consolidations). I've been working closely with fellow product managers @Vamsi Bhagi and @Arjoon Som on our new backup & restore and super excited to share it with you all for feedback!

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Structure and Timeline

We are completely overhauling the backup & restore experience - starting with an emphasis on increased reliability and performance. However, we have to do this in stages, largely because some features require us to ensure that other features are working as expected. For example, how we finish building the restore functionality will largely depend on the feedback that comes in on the backup functionality, and what changes we might have to make to that.

The stages will roughly follow this order:

• Confluence Full Backup CLI

• Jira (entire family of Jira - Jira software, JSM, JWM, etc.) Full Backup CLI < - - - We are here

• Confluence Restore CLI < - - - Coming up next (Q2 2022)

• Jira Software Restore CLI

• Other features - think incremental backup, more granular restore, APIs, a new UI

As a reminder, this means that for a period of time, we are asking for you to test the backup functionality without being able to restore the data, although this is coming very soon. Once we get to the restore process, then we’ll ask you to test both of those again together.

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How the Early Access Program works

I want to emphasize that this early access program is for taking a backup of your data. That backup is human readable and will include all of your data. Please take every precaution necessary to protect your backup on your network.

On the signup form, we ask for a couple of items

1. the email address you use to login to your Atlassian product.

2. The site/sites you will test this against.

3. What products you have that you would like to test against.

4. And your current administrative level. This does require you to be a minimum of a Site admin, in order to run the backup.

From there, we will go through and select a number of testers just to start initially, and bring in more as we roll out additional capabilities. We will be selecting a variety of different instance types, in terms of the amount of data you are storing on your site. So we need all types!

If selected, we will email you a link to join our closed EAP community group, where you will have access to the new CLI, documentation, and have a place to ask questions and provide feedback directly to myself and the engineers.

Use this link to signup for early access, which includes reading and acknowledging our early access program disclaimers:

https://surveys.atlassian.com/jfe/form/SV_5gyyB31aoNkSnX0

Also for more discussion on backup and restore specifically - please join this community group: 

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Backup-Restore/gh-p/backupandrestore

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Expectations and Asks of you

This is a long-running EAP with multiple phases, so we will be asking you to help continuously test as we add additional features. We are looking for really active participants, who are willing to test the functionality, usability, scale, and performance of this new experience. Our hope is to continue building this new experience alongside you.

As we add new features, our hope is that you will download the new versions of the experience, test it out, and provide your feedback, bug reports, and questions. We’ll also want to hear about what you think is missing, and what else you’d like to see from us for each iteration.

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Quick Demo of the new experience

My colleague @RJ Gazarek has created a quick demo of the new experience (Confluence), so you can get a taste of what you will be testing!

Cheers,

Steven

[Bryan Guffey]

Hey Steven - I tried to send a request to join the backup & restore group that you out a link to and it wouldn't let me! 

[Taranjeet Singh]

@Steven Bao This sounds very interesting - a new Backup & Restore Experience for Confluence & Jira!

1. Is it only for Cloud products, or DC products as well?

2. Does Backup & Restore CLI here mean "Command Line Interface" for Backup & Restore instead of Backup & Restore using the UI?

3. What is going to be the major difference in the previous & new backup & restore experience? CLI, new UI or just the reliability & performance?

[Steven Bao]

Hey @Bryan Guffey - what error are you seeing?

[Steven Bao]

@Taranjeet Singh 

1. Just for cloud.

2. Correct, currently in EAP it is in a command line interface while we gather feedback on the functional features. Replacing the current backup manager UI with this revamped backup/restore is in the backlog.

3. Focus is reliability and performance at scale - backup will now be much more granular - for example for Confluence - users/groups, global data, and space data in separate folders. This will also enable more control for restore - instead of the complete overwrite today, users will be able to restore a subset of spaces for example.

[Danny Fast]

Your request to join was sent April 18, 2022

You will receive a notification if your request is approved.

@Steven Bao  

[Steven Bao]

@Danny Fast @Bryan Guffey - backlog of requests has been approved! Strangely I wasn't getting the emails for the past week - I'll follow up on this. Thanks!

[Taranjeet Singh]

Thanks you for the clarification, @Steven Bao !

So, EAP is for testing Backup & Restore in CLI mode, but when the new Backup & Restore Feature will be finally rolled out for all cloud users, it will be in UI mode. Am I right?

[Bryan Guffey]

@Steven Bao  - whatever it is, it's gone now! When should we get an email if we are accepted into the EAP? :-)

[Steven Bao]

@Taranjeet Singh - end state will be UI, TBD whether we'll make it more widely available (public beta) as CLI.

[Steven Bao]

@Bryan Guffey thanks for signing up - we are looking to do another round of invites as we roll out Confluence Restore to EAP which will be within the quarter :) 

[wouter.vandenberg]

Thanks for this! Tested this on one of our test instances. As described the Jira part is in Progress but the Confluence one gave me some results I am not too sure about. See below image. EDIT: I understand we have to wait until we can restore the data to check these files. The attachment file is tested after checking the meta information and looks good. 

[Ammar Ahmed Butt]

Done!

[Milo G]

@Steven Bao Could you continue approving requests to join?  I've sent mine on April 28th.  Re-requested today.  thank you

[Steven Bao]

@Milo G done!

[Dave Liao]

@Steven Bao - FYI just sent a request - feel free to approve anytime!

[Taranjeet Singh]

Thank you for your response to my last question, @Steven Bao !

[Vincent Synan]

Hi @Steven Bao  - I would very much like to join the community.
Covering on behalf of the UK Consumer Champion organisation  - Which?

Thanks,
Vince

Lead Delivery Manager,
which.co.uk

[alexbartok]

@Steven BaoHi Steven, are you still accepting testers or am I too late? At any rate, I did fill out the form.

I would be interested in running automated backups of our freshly migrated site.

[Steven Bao]

Hey @alexbartok apologies for the late response, I was on leave. We take a look at submissions on a rolling basis every few weeks, you will get an email if selected.

Cheers,

Steven