Is taking backups redundant with Atlassian on Demand?

[Helen Smart]

This seems to be the case as redundancy and backup are both features of the remote servers we're accessing, but I just want to be sure there is nothing we need to do at our end (ie. the client company)? What do others do?

[Dave]

Hi Helen,

WebDAV is non-persistent storage for precisely this purpose - uploading or downloading export files.  After you create the backup, you should then download it from WebDAV so that you can save it locally; it will not remain on your OnDemand instance.  Details for accessing this can be found at https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/AOD/Uploading+Data+via+WebDAV

In regards to that message, it is informational so that you know what version you can import your data into if you wished to do so.

Cheers,

-dave

[Helen Smart]

David, I have some questions, having read the Backup manager page:

• Backup files are stored in your WebDav directory and automatically deleted after 24 hours.

Where is WebDav located, I assume it is part of the On Demand cloud location? Why does it only persist for 24 hours? What if we wanted to do, say, weekly backups?

• You can export and then import your data into a Self-Hosted Confluence instance. Currently, Confluence 5.3 and newer versions are able to import OnDemand backups

But why use a cloud service if we need to host a whole Confluence instance on our own server? Sure, if something was to go wrong with Confluence on Demand we might need to purchase a new instance of Confluence and restore the data onto that. But in the meantime, I thought we would only need to keep XML copies (or whatever format it is) of the backup as a disaster recovery measure. Am I not understanding the process properly as set out in Backup Manager?

My assumption was that we should backup weekly or fortnightly and keep the backup accessible for DR purposes, similar to what we do with all our servers, without restoring into anything unless it is actually required to do so.

Helen

[Helen Smart]

Thanks for that David and Sarah. We're a small company so the server space is not such an issue!

[Dave]

Hi Helen,

Atlassian takes backups for disaster recovery purposes, but those are not available to customers and are not useful outside of our infrastructure.  We would suggest taking regular backups as well on your end in the event that you find a need to recover anything that might have been deleted accidentally or to roll back configuration changes.

Cheers,

-dave

[Sarah Elmer]

We leave up to Atlassian and do no backups of our own. Just the server space needed, in our case, would be huge!