This page last changed on Nov 05, 2008 by amohdaris.

Confluence's Built-in Backup

Confluence provides an automatic nightly XML backup. This is ideal if you do not have database administration familiarity, if you are evaluating, or if you are migrating to a new database. Otherwise, it can be inefficient compared to native backup tools.

Establishing a Production System Backup Solution

The built in backup functionality in Confluence requires a lot of memory to run and is less reliable when restoring. Atlassian recommends establishing an alternative database backup strategy:

  • Create a backup or dump of your database using tools provided by your database
  • Create a file system backup of your Confluence home directory

Once this is in place, disable the daily backups from Administration > Daily Backup Admin.

We want to stress that creating these two backups is just as good as having a Confluence XML backup. You will be able to restore your whole site, including all data, attachments and configuration information intact with these two backups. We have written up a document on how to do this here.

Step by step instructions

Take a look a the Migrating Confluence Between Servers document for a walkthrough on how to restore a backup using this technique.

Other processes

XML backups are described and used for other processes in confluence, like upgrading and moving servers. Using the backup strategy described here will work for those processes. Our upgrade guide does not require the use of an xml backup (an old upgrade procedure, and the JIRA upgrade guide use XML backups for upgrading), and our migrate server procedure - used to set up a test server - can leverage an sql dump as well.

The only process that requires the XML backup is the database migration procedure.

Document generated by Confluence on Dec 03, 2008 15:14