How to move the shared-home folder in Confluence Data Center

Summary

The shared-home folder in Confluence Data Center stores the Confluence attachments, backups, rendered previews, among other content. When migrating to a different disk or making changes to Confluence Data Center, you might want to update the location of your shared-home directory.

Solution

Finding the shared home for your Confluence application

The location of your shared-home folder can be found in your <confluence-home>/confluence.cfg.xml file in the confluence.cluster.home property.

The location of the Confluence home directory is defined when you install Confluence. This location is stored in the confluence-init.properties file, which is located in the confluence/WEB-INF/classes directory of your Confluence Installation directory. When Confluence is running, you can find the location of the home directory in Administration > General Configuration > System Information > Confluence Information - Confluence Home.

Solution

For this example, we will use /OLD_HOME/shared/ as the old path, and /NEW_HOME/shared/ as the new path. To update the shared-home folder:

1. Shutdown Confluence

2. Edit the confluence_home/confluence.cfg.xml and update the following line:

   1 <property name="confluence.cluster.home">/OLD_HOME/shared</property>

   ℹ️ This property for DC instance would be available if Confluence DC is running in cluster mode only.

3. Change that value to the new path: /NEW_HOME/shared/

   ℹ️ Make sure to do this for every node of Confluence, as each node has a local copy of this file

4. Run the following query and look for <backupPath>...</backupPath> tag:

   1 2 3 4 select BANDANAVALUE from BANDANA where BANDANACONTEXT = '_GLOBAL' and BANDANAKEY = 'atlassian.confluence.settings';

5. Run the following UPDATE statement on the database (this example is for PostgreSQL):

   1 2 3 4 update BANDANA set BANDANAVALUE = REPLACE(BANDANAVALUE, '<backupPath>OLD_BACKUP_PATH</backupPath>', '<backupPath>/NEW_HOME/shared/backups</backupPath>'); where BANDANACONTEXT = '_GLOBAL' and BANDANAKEY = 'atlassian.confluence.settings';
   Always back up your data before making any database modifications. If possible, test any alter, insert, update, or delete SQL commands on a staging server first.

6. Copy any contents under the previous shared-home folder to the new location:

   1 cp -R /OLD_HOME/shared/ /NEW_HOME/shared/

7. Restart All the Confluence nodes

Once all the steps are completed, perform the following verifications to check that the new folder is in use:

• Confirm your attachments are accessible from each node of Confluence

• Create an XML backup (Back up a Site) and confirm that it is created under the new location.

  ⚠️ If the behaviour is not the expected, please review the solution/workaround stated in CONFSERVER-53451 - Backups use original home in confluence-init.properties after being changed