Confluence home directory backup: What directories are safe to exclude?

[Petros Demetriades]

By reading the atlassian confluence administration pages and several answers here, I understand that the best practice confluence backup is to:

1. Backup the database using a native DB backup tool (e.g. pg_dump for postgreSQL);
2. Backup the home directory separately.

The atlassian backup pages refer to "backing up the entire confluence home directory". However over time this directory accumulates lots of stuff that seem unnecessary to backup (e.g. temp, backups, index, plugins-cache, etc.) which needlessly increase backup size.

From what I've read I gather that most of the stuff in the excluded directories gets re-created when confluence is restarted (e.g. the plugin-related folders) and the indexes and thumbnails can be recreated on demand via the administration UI).

Could someone please confirm that it is safe to exclude the following directories from the confluence backup directory? (I couldn't find a definitive answer anywhere hence the question)

• (home directory path)/attachments: INCLUDE
• (home directory path)/backups: EXCLUDE
• (home directory path)/bundled-plugins: EXCLUDE
• (home directory path)/config: INCLUDE
• (home directory path)/confluence.cfg.xml: INCLUDE
• (home directory path)/index: EXCLUDE
• (home directory path)/logs: EXCLUDE
• (home directory path)/plugins-cache: EXCLUDE
• (home directory path)/plugins-osgi-cache: EXCLUDE
• (home directory path)/plugins-temp: EXCLUDE
• (home directory path)/restore: EXCLUDE
• (home directory path)/temp: EXCLUDE
• (home directory path)/thumbnails: EXCLUDE
• (home directory path)/viewfile: EXCLUDE

Thanks in advance.

[Bob Swift · Accepted solution]

As mentioned on Backuping Confluence - I exclude ['logs', 'backups', 'restore', 'temp', 'viewfile', 'oscache', 'plugin-cache', 'plugins-temp'] and I know that works. I would guess bundled-plugins could be excluded. Index can be rebuilt, but it takes time - so that is a tradeoff. I would guess thumbnails would be regenerated too.

[Petros Demetriades]

Thanks Bob. Much appreciated.