Restore my pages

[Quyen Hong]

Hello, my org used Confluence and we shut it down for a while and activated it today. The user noticed that our pages were gone and we didn't delete them (so it doesn't appear in the archive/ trash), also we don't have a backup for Confluence (because it was off). Is there a way to restore those pages?

[Trudy Claspill · Accepted solution]

Hello @Quyen Hong 

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

Can you confirm that you are referring to a Confluence Cloud environment, and not a Confluence Data Center environment?

When you say that you "shut down" Confluence for a while, what do you mean? Do you mean you cancelled your subscription? If so, how long ago did you do that?

Only a person with Billing Administrator access or Organization Administrator access would have had the ability to cancel the subscription.

If you cancelled your subscription, eventually your Confluence instance and all of its data would be permanently deleted. The exact date of that deletion depends on the type of subscription you had. Prior to the data being deleted the Organization Admins, Billing Admins, and Technical Contacts listed for the Confluence product would've received emails warning of the permanent deletion of the data.

If the subscription was cancelled and the subscription plan-specific time periods have passed, then the data has been permanently deleted and is not recoverable.

[Kinga_Getint · Accepted solution]

Hey @Quyen Hong

If the pages don't appear in the archive, trash, or current database and there’s no backup available, direct restoration through the Confluence admin UI unfortunately isn’t possible. However, there are a few steps you can still take before giving up and it's worth to consider.

You can try:

• Verify database and home directory configurations

Double-check that Confluence is connected to the correct database and using the right home directory from before the shutdown. It’s not uncommon, after a restart, to accidentally connect to an empty or new database, which can make everything seem lost.

• Check for missing pages in Reorder, Orphaned, or Restricted Sections
  

Sometimes, pages can be seen under Space Tools via Content Tools > Reorder Pages or perhaps are restricted and not visible to everyone.

• Explore manual recovery options

Ask your IT team if they keep server-level backups, database dumps, disk snapshots, or VM images beyond typical Confluence backups. Sometimes, infrastructure backups exist even if application-specific ones were never made.

If any backups exist from before the outage (even if not recent), it might be possible to recover lost data.

Eventually, if your org has a paid support plan, submit a request with as much detail as possible to Atlassian Support. 

I hope you will find a way!