Backup & rapid upgrade advice

[Steven White]

Hi 

We don't have an administrator who looks after our servers, but one of the senior managers and myself look after the IT within the office.  So i'm looking for some advice and confirmation regarding the upgrade process, and after spending most of the morning in Atlassian documentation site and not getting a straight answer i've come on here. 

We are currently running the Server version of JIRA 6.2.4, plus the following plugins

• JIRA Timesheet reports & gadgets
• JIRA Agile 

and looking to upgrade to the latest version 6.4. We currently have between 20-30 small projects running within the system but also use it for the company monthly timesheets.  From what i've read online it looks like the "Rapid Upgrade" method would be a suitable (as long as we don't upgrade around month end). 

Ok now to my questions;

1 Am i correct in saying we can upgrade directly from 6.2.4 to 6.4 (ie we don't need to install 6.3 first)? 

2 The inbuilt XML backup functionality backs up the following;

• Project & Issues 
• Users & Groups
• Custom workflows (and which projects they are attributed too)
• User, Group and Project Permission
• Agile / Sprint boards
  

3 Are there any other files/directories we should be backing up? 

I am pretty sure the answer to questions 1 & 2 are yes but wanted to make sure before we proceed.  Question 3 on the other-hand i will take advice. 

Thank you in advance

[Shayne · Accepted solution]

1. That's correct.
2. The XML backup will migrate all information stored within JIRA's database, which includes everything you mentioned, though the user data may be a little bit of a grey area depending on whether or not you've configured your instance of JIRA to connect to an LDAP server.
3. Some other files you may want to backup before upgrading can be found in our documentation for Important Directories and Files under the 'JIRA Installation Directory' heading. These are the more commonly modified files in a JIRA installation.

I'd also recommend establishing a staging environment so you can run through the upgrade to make sure everything works as expected before you proceed with upgrading your live/production environment. Once you've upgraded the staging environment, spend a little time running through the more commonly used areas of JIRA to make sure that things are looking good.

I hope that helps!

[Paulo Hennig]

Hello Steven,

Questions 1 & 2 are "Yes". About question 3, if you have attachments enabled, all files attached to JIRA issues are stored in the data\attachments directory (not in the database), so XML backup won't save your attachments. Please, have a read here