This page last changed on Jul 18, 2008 by jlargman.

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.

Choosing a Backup Solution

If these apply to you:

  • encountering problems creating a site backup from the Administration > Backup and Restore page
  • automatic daily backups do not work anymore
  • last working backup size without attachments is large (say over 500Mb)

You may want to consider an alternative backup strategy. As you may have already discovered, the built in backup functionality in Confluence requires a lot of memory to run. In some cases, increasing the total memory allocated your Confluence instance will still not help.

In these circumstances we recommend that you:

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

You can disable daily backups from Administration > Daily Backup Admin.

We want to stress that creating these two backups is just as good as having a Confluence 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.

Other processes

XML backups are described and used for other processes in confluence, like upgrading and moving servers. Using the alternate 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 Aug 07, 2008 19:08