Is there an easy way to temporarily point to a different database?

[Aaron Hurley]

I am trying to look at a DB backup (of a separate instance) of Confluence. Can I do this by simply changing the confluence.cfg.xml file or is there a more detailed process?

I only want to do this temporarily so that I can recover some data, I will then point back to the initial DB.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

You should be able to change the url and then swap it back, but you could have problems.

Confluence has caches and indices, so you'll probably end up with a corrupted index (so re-indexing after each change is probably worth doing), and if your confluences have different plugins, you may have some issues with them poking data into each database automatically.

Other than that though, your databases will be fine (barring extraneous plugin info).

Personally, I'd not bother - I'd set up a second Confluence to read the backup DB - your license entitles you to a developer license you can use, and you can set it up by almost copying the install for the main one wholesale.