How do you migrate issues from one JIRA instance to another JIRA instance in a different version?

[Kelsey Collins]

We created a new JIRA instance using JIRA version 6.3.13 on a Windows 2012 server last year. Our old JIRA version 3.10.2 is on a Windows 2003 server and is only used to research historical tickets. We are in the process of migrating all the Windows 2003 servers to 2012 and would like to migrate all of the old tickets to the new JIRA instance in order to maintain the data while turning off the 2003 server.

Is there any way to migrate those old tickets into our new JIRA instance?

[Nicolas Bourdages]

Export your issues in excel, save as a csv file, and re-import them in the destination server using the External system import CSV import. That's reasonably easy, but you should still try this out on a test environment first to make sure your mapping is functional and doesn't create a bunch of unwanted issues.

Now, that won't migrate your projects and their configurations, but unless you're willing to upgrade your old instance, there's not much you can do about that. Since they're historical tickets, I figure it wouldn't matter much anyway.