In the SaaS world, it is your responsibility to backup Jira cloud per the shared responsibility model used by Atlassian and other SaaS vendors. Know your responsibilities as a SaaS administrator when using Atlassian’s Jira Cloud here. Data deletion, be it accidental or malicious, occurs on an unpredictable basis, and such events are out of your control as an administrator; hence, your insurance policy against data deletion is to back up your data. Let's review the pros and cons of doing a Jira Cloud Database Backup using the tools that Atlassian provides.
The Jira Backup Manager is available under the “Settings → Import and Export” menu. Check the box on “Include attachments, avatars, and logos in the backup” as you want to ensure all your attachments are backed up. Once the backup is completed, you can download the backup file and save it away. You would have to pull the backup file from the cloud and then potentially re-upload it into a different cloud storage, depending on where your data store is.
There are a couple of things to consider as part of your Jira backup strategy:
The whole purpose of creating a backup is to ensure you can restore the data back in the case of any accidental data loss. Lets next review the steps that need to be taken to get the data back into your Jira site.
The Import Jira Cloud functionality is available under the “Settings → Import and Export” menu, but before you begin a restore of your Jira backup data lets review the steps that Atlassian recommends that you take.
Knowing how much data is in your backups is absolutely critical, as that will determine how you proceed. Do you need to engage Atlassian support, or can you do it yourself? When you do a database import back into your production site, all existing data will be overwritten, be very careful when you do that as you will lose all the data that was added /modified between the date/time when you took the backup to when you can re-import the data back into a Jira site. While your intent may have been to recover critical data from the backup that you lost, a full restore may not lead to the intended outcome.
Having now seen the steps that need to be taken to do a backup and restore of your Jira site, let me summarize the pros and cons of doing a database backup and restore.
Implementing a data protection strategy for Atlassian Jira cloud has become a necessity and is equally complex. With limited native options from Atlassian, you will have to either build some custom scripts, manage data on your own to address your data protection needs or you leverage 3rd party SaaS applications such as Revyz to offload data protection from your core IT team.
Revyz Backup & Restore app for Jira can store data securely & remotely, making it available for various recovery scenarios without having you to rollback the entire site.
Try Revyz for free - Atlassian marketplace link. Share your feedback on how we can improve & what other use cases you would want Revyz to address.