5/20/2020 Preventing users from accessing Jira applications during backups - Atlassian Documentation

Preventing users from accessing Jira

applications during backups

For production use, it is strongly recommended that for regular backups, you use
native database backup tools instead of the Jira application XML backup service.

When Jira applications are in use, XML backups are not guaranteed to be consistent as the database
may be updated during the backup process. Jira applications do not report any warnings or error
messages when an XML backup is generated with inconsistencies and such XML backups will fail during
the restore process. Native database backup tools offer a much more consistent and reliable means of
storing (and restoring) data.

If you perform an XML backup (e.g. when upgrading Jira applications via a test environment or migrating Jira
applications to another server), you can follow one of these methods to prevent users from accessing Jira
applications and minimize inconsistencies in the backup file:

Recommended method:
If you have an Apache or other web/proxy server sitting in front of Jira applications, then you can stop
Apache from proxying to Jira applications, and serve a static HTML page with a nice message along the
lines of "Jira applications are undergoing maintenance". Note:
The administrator must be able to access Jira applications directly (not through Apache) to
perform the XML backup.
This method does not require Jira applications to be restarted.

Alternative method 1:
1. Shut down all Jira applications, configure them to listen on a different port and restart. Do this by
editing the server.xml file. Change the following section:

<Connector port="8080"
maxHttpHeaderSize="8192" maxThreads="150" minSpareThreads="25" maxSpar
enableLookups="false" redirectPort="8443" acceptCount="100" connection

Note: If you have enabled HTTPS, then you would need to edit the HTTPS Connector section as
well.
2. Restart all Jira applications and do the XML backup.
3. Shut down all Jira applications, change all the settings back, then re-start the applications.

Alternative method 2:
If you have a firewall in front of your Jira applications, you could stop requests from getting through or
change the port number that it uses. Note:
The administrator will need to log into your Jira applications on the temporary port number (or
access it from behind the firewall), to perform the XML backup.
This method does not require Jira applications to be restarted.

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5/20/2020 Preventing users from accessing Jira applications during backups - Atlassian Documentation

Before you start:

Whichever method you choose, we recommend setting an announcement banner to warn your users
that Jira applications will be unavailable for a period of time.

Last modified on May 29, 2018

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