Is there a way to view Jira issues from an older instance without importing them?

[Susan Briscoe]

We have an older Jira instance that will be end-of-life shortly. I performed a backup of all the Jira issues in that instance (a 50GB file), and would like to know what our options are for allowing view-only access to these issues without dumping them all into our current Jira instance with an import?

[Daniel Ebers]

Hi Susan,

if I understand it correctly the old instance will be shutdown, is this correct?

You mentioned dumping the data into the current Jira instance. This is an option which will allow you to work on your issues as you were familiar with (assuming the import works okay) - what means you can search, comment, transition issues and so on.

A plain dump (if a SQL dump is meant) does not help in most cases, data is readable per definition but in a database language which is quite hard to read for humans.

One last option that comes to mind is to export all relevant issues (that could be a lot, though!) to text files, PDF, CSV or similar.

Depending on how the export is structured on what your use cases look specifically for "viewing only" the issues it might by possible to spin up a Jira Cloud instance for that use case. This, probably, would need extra investigation and some tests if it works (assuming the instance you want to retire is a on-premise solution).

Cheers,
Daniel