We are on Atlassian Cloud. Do we need to do backups or does Atlassian guarantee storage of our data?

[ian.johnsen]

We are on Jira Cloud.

Do we need to do backups or does Atlassian guarantee storage of our data?

What is Atlassian responsible for in terms of our data?

What should we be responsible for?

We want to ensure our Jira & Confluence data is safe and secure. Other apps like Google take care of our data with Google Vault. 

I know there is a manual backup you can do, but it is manual and only stays in the cloud for 7 days....but is this necessary?

And difference with data retention between Standard vs Premium Plan?

Thanks so much!

[Jack Brickey]

My advice is to indeed do backups. We auto backup every few days and store our backup in our own cloud environment. From what I understand, Atlassian performs their own server back ups which can be use for catastrophic failures not at an individual customer data basis. Disclaimer, I do not work for Atlassian  so cannot speak for them definitively.

[Darin - Opus Guard]

@ian.johnsen As for the difference with retention between standard and premium, content created in Atlassian Confluence/Jira lives on for as long as your subscription is active. Premium comes with some basic automation functions to help you clean up content, but not necessarily in an ISO/SOC2 way. Archived/Deleted content is still considered discoverable in terms of risk, only purged content is irrecoverable and compliant to any expired content.

Since you mentioned Google Vault, a critical part of Vault is the content retention and information governance it provides. There's no out of the box solution in Confluence to deploy retention policies, allowing for global expirations, extensions, auditing, and generally keeping compliant to ISO/SOC2 retention requirements.

Content Retention Manager for Confluence in the Atlassian Marketplace is focused on the around automated delete/purging (post backup as necessary) in a similar manner as Google Vault. This helps keep your risk related to aging content down, as well as keep your storage space down.

[Ahmet Kilic]

Currently it is only possible some nice apps:

• Rewind Backups for Jira Cloud
• Revyz Data Manager for Jira |Backup Restore Analyze Optimize

[Stu Lees ️ REVYZ]

Thanks for including our app in your recommendation Ahmet!   Here are some more resources that anyone looking to solve this problem can use (without necessarily needing to use any of our products!)

[Cloud Backup Resources]
We have a bunch of resources on our website that can help people looking to navigate backups in Jira (and Confluence) cloud.  Here are the main ones;

Guide to Jira Backups  in Cloud:  How to Back Up JIra (3 methods in Cloud)

Our Cloud Resource Centre for Jira (loads of videos, interviews, webinars and resources:  https://www.revyz.io/jira-cloud-resource

Being quite up front, I'm from Revyz and we're a Marketplace App developer who have several backup apps on the Marketplace.   If you ever want to chat about this without getting a hard-sell, then feel free to reach out to me personally.

[Choosing a Backup App]

If you decide to go down the track of using a professional, reliable backup app for your cloud instance, then here is a list of questions that you should be asking of any vendors that you look at:  What to Ask When Choosing a Jira Cloud Backup Solution 

[Daniel Ebers]

Hi Ian,

there are discussions and considerations on this topic regularly here in Community and the general advise everytime is to do backups on your own, just for double safety and to make sure you are on the safe side.

There is an article in knowledge base on how to automate cloud backups:
https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirakb/how-to-automate-backups-for-jira-cloud-applications-779160659.html

The following page might also provide some useful information - at least for the question to data retention (between standard and premium) I cloud not make out any difference.
https://confluence.atlassian.com/cloud/data-storage-faq-873871367.html

How often is data backed up?

Automated Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) backups are generated daily and retained for 30 days to allow for point-in-time data restoration. Snapshots of the primary RDS are also taken daily. Copies of the snapshot are sent to a secondary region, where they’re kept for 3 days before being deleted. RDS snapshots are encrypted at rest. 

Atlassian cloud sites don't support the use of backup data to roll back changes.

Some additional reading in form of community posts I found on the backup discussions include:

• Does Atlassian take automated backups of cloud based instances? 
  https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Core-questions/Does-Atlassian-take-automated-backups-of-cloud-based-instances/qaq-p/130745
• Jira Back-ups – What is their value and necessity?
  https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-questions/Jira-Back-ups-What-is-their-value-and-necessity/qaq-p/1482021

Cheers,
Daniel

[Danny Grenzowski _Rewind_]

We built Rewind to automate your Atlassian Cloud backups and restores. Feel free to try us out for free on the Atlassian Marketplace - I'd love to hear your feedback.

Danny from Rewind

[Franklin Vaugn]

Yes Danny. And while I golf clap your efforts at creating a reliable Jira Cloud backup program, Rewind does not back up 3rd party app data, which many people consider an essential requirement. 

[Vish Reddy _Revyz_]

Hi @Franklin Vaugn 

I am part of Revyz.

To be fair to Danny, Backing up Third party apps data is a real problem. I don't believe any backup vendor including us can backup that data.

Even Atlassian does not pull in third party app data as part of the xml backup file that gets created.

I have spoken to multiple app vendors including Tempo, X-Ray etc.. to see if they are open to providing API's to backup vendors to help create a comprehensive backup, unfortunately the incentives are mis-aligned. Unless customers or Atlassian forces them, this will remain to be a problem.

On the Automations front, we are releasing a solution to backup Automations during the week of Nov 20th, would love for you to give it a try and provide your feedback.

We have also published a doc which clearly states what we can do and more importantly not, here is a link to the doc - Revyz Data Manager for Jira Capabilities

Also note if you are taking an xml backup, Automations are not included as part of that.

Thanks

Vish