Migrating a 500 User License Confluence Developer Instance to a 100 User License Production Instance

[Phil Gochenour]

Hi, I've wound up in a situation where I have a Developer instance of Confluence with a 500 user license limit, and I want to be able to migrate that instance to a production instance with a 100 user license. I originally thought I could do this with a backup of the developer instance and restore to the production instance, but I'm conerned that this won't work because the licenses don't match.

I've wound up in this situation because I used my developer instance to build out what has turned out to be a completely new Confluence installation that is separate from our current production instance, and I want to launch a second, licensed production instance with what I have created in the Developer instance. The developer instance only has 69 registered users who were my beta testers, and I don't expect to exceed the 100 user license for at least six months.

If backup/restore won't work to migrate the developer instance to production because of the license problem, is there some other means by which I can achieve this migration? Could I export/restore the spaces one-by-one?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

The good news is that you don't really have a big problem.

Your data is just your data - if you import the whole lot into a new Confluence, it'll work fine with a 500 user licence as you'd expect. It'll also work fine with a 100 user licence, unless you have more than 100 *active* users. If you are over that 100 limit, then bits of it will not work until you get the user count down below 100. Your data will be untouched, it'll move fine, and you'll be able to read it. But functions like "edit" will be locked until you reduce the user count. User maintenance is obviously not one of the functions that will fail...

[Phil Gochenour]

Thanks Nic, I was unsure if the export was just the data, or if it carried configuration/license information with it.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

It carries most of the config (all the bits stored in the database at least), and the licence details too, but it'll spot that it's on a different server and ignore the old licence on import.

One of the things I've always liked about Atlassian is that they strongly believe your data belongs to you and they don't drop bits of it or render it useless just because you don't have a current licence. Even if you let a licence expire, you can still use the systems (you're unsupported and can't upgrade, but it will still work in full), and the licences behave reasonably sensibly in cases like yours. It's a bit of a faff, but you don't lose anything.