Need to import a backup (entities.xml) into a new project board in an existing installation

[Jamie Valentin]

My company has been self-hosting jira for a couple of projects and simultaneously has had a bunch of other projects hosted on Atlassian. We want to get rid of the self-hosted solution and import everything into the Atlassian account, into a specific board named something like "Legacy issues". How can this be done?

[Theinvisibleman]

Hey there Jamie!

I'm afraid it's not possible to import information from a different Jira instance into only a project board of the existing installation. If a full import were to be done, it would overwrite the entire instance, and Jira Cloud does not support project imports.

The only way that I could think of would be to use the CSV Importer to import the issues from the CSV file into the Jira Cloud instance. I have to note though that tickets created via CSV import would not carry over their comments and/or attachments.

[Jamie Valentin]

I figured the attachments had to be uploaded manually, but I can't see why comments won't be included. Is there any way to bring them over manually?

[Theinvisibleman]

Jamie, I'm terribly sorry but I was mistaken, comment exports and imports via CSV are indeed possible (I tested this in my own JIRA Cloud instance). Just be sure to perform the import via the 'external system import > CSV' menu rather than via the Issue Navigator.

Of course, I'd highly recommend that you test this out in a test/dummy project first, just to ensure that everything works out well.

[Jamie Valentin]

Joe, I'd received a response from tech support that refers me to https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirakb/how-to-merge-two-different-jira-cloud-applications-together-779160767.html, and seems to indicate that I may lose data on import anyway. I am definitely concerned about this possibility and am wondering if we will be better off manually recreating them. Of course, if I can reliably import the old tickets into the new board in the Atlassian hosted installation, that would be the best option. I'm just needing to be sure it will work with no data loss before we start down this path.

[Theinvisibleman]

Hey Jamie, I checked with some of my colleagues and the method would work, though as it mentioned you would lose some data (for example, data from the activeobjects/plugin side). 

However, with that aside, the data should still be imported successfully. 

Of course, I'd highly recommend you to do a dry run of this in test instances first, before doing anything in the production instances.