Use the Confluence Cloud Migration Assistant to migrate

The Confluence Cloud Migration Assistant is an app that helps you easily move content, users, and groups from Confluence Server or Data Center to Confluence Cloud. Built and maintained by Atlassian, the app is free to install and use.

With the app, you can choose what you want to move to the Cloud, start migrating at your convenience, and monitor the progress of everything throughout the migration process.

When to use the Confluence Cloud Migration Assistant

Use the Confluence Cloud Migration Assistant when:

• you want to move users or data from Confluence Server or Data Center to Confluence Cloud

• you want to assess your apps before moving from Confluence Server or Data Center to Confluence Cloud

• you want to run a test or trial migration from Confluence Server or Data Center to Confluence Cloud

• the Atlassian Support team has recommended using the app

Install the Confluence Cloud Migration Assistant app

If your Confluence Server site is version 6.13 or above you won't need to install anything as the Confluence Cloud Migration Assistant comes pre-installed, although you may be asked to update the app. 

To install the app on versions 5.10 to 6.12:

1. In Confluence Server, go to > Manage apps.

2. Choose Find new add-ons. 

3. Search for the Confluence Cloud Migration Assistant. 

4. Choose Install and you're all set.

Locate the Migration Assistant

To find the Migration Assistant:

1. Go to Confluence Administration > look for the Atlassian Cloud category > select Migration Assistant.

There are four steps to create your migration path:

1. Assess your apps

2. Prepare your apps

3. Review all email domains

4. Migrate your data

The sections that follow explain each of these stages in detail.

If you have no apps to migrate, you can skip to step 3.

The sections that follow explain each of these stages in detail.

1. Assess your apps

Use the Confluence Cloud Migration Assistant to see the apps you’ve installed on your Server and assess apps in preparation to migrate. Assessing your apps and choosing alternatives (if required) for your Cloud site before migration removes the risk of your apps blocking your migration at a crucial time. Learn how to assess apps

To begin assessing your apps:

On the Migration Assistant home screen, select Assess your apps.

Learn more about assessing apps with the Confluence Cloud Migration Assistant

When you have finished assessing your apps, select Done. This takes you back to the Migration Assistant home screen where you can choose to prepare your apps as the next step.

2. Prepare your apps

There are three main tasks you’ll perform at this stage:

• connect to your Cloud site

• install your apps

• agree to app migration

On the Migration Assistant home screen, select Prepare your apps. This takes you to the Connect to Cloud screen.

2.a. Connect to your Cloud site

You can link your chosen Cloud site at this step. There are three ways to do this:

• select your existing Cloud site from the dropdown

• signup for an Atlassian Free plan (max 10 users, free Cloud site)

• set up a free product trial

Once your destination is selected, click Continue.

2.b. Install your apps

On the Install your apps screen:

1. Select Install app for each listed app to install it on your Cloud site.

2. Read the support and privacy policy for each app.

3. Select Continue. This takes you to the Agree to app migration screen.

2.c. Agree to app migration

In order to complete the assessment flow, you must provide consent and agree to app migration for each app.

On the Agree to app migration screen:

1. Select View policy for each app that shows as requiring your consent.
   This opens a card that:

   1. lists all the types of data the Marketplace Partner (vendor) will have access to, such as read core data or read user data.

   2. links to the Atlassian Marketplace Terms of Use, the Marketplace Partners Privacy Policy, and the Marketplace Partners Terms of Use. We strongly recommend you read this for each app you migrate.
      
      

2. Select Confirm on this card.

3. When you have performed the above action for all applicable apps, select Done to return to the Migration Assistant home screen.

You can find detailed information the third-party migration agreement in the section that follows.

Third-party migration agreement

When an app migration is performed, the migration moves the data from each Server app to its Cloud version on your Cloud site. The Marketplace Partner (vendor) that built each app has created a migration pathway to move the data.

During this process, the Marketplace Partner will actually be performing the app data migration, not Atlassian. Because of this, you need to review, and agree to each Marketplace Partner agreement so they can access your data to migrate it.

The Marketplace Partner (vendor) that built each app has created a migration pathway to move the data, via the Atlassian platform known as the App migration platform.

It is very important to understand that the Marketplace Partner (vendor), who developed a particular app, will be performing the data migration. Atlassian has developed the App migration platform to be the conduit between the Marketplace Partner and yourself as the app user.

Data security and allowed access scopes

The App migration platform allows Server apps to export your app data to Cloud, and to access Confluence and Jira mappings. The access is very tightly controlled and restricted to a list of data types, or access scopes.

• The Marketplace Partners who built the apps installed on your Server instance, have documented the access scopes required to migrate the apps.

• These access scopes are surfaced in the Cloud Migration Assistant so that you can consent to the Marketplace Partner accessing this data.

You can find the specific information and list of access scopes on the Security and Access scopes pages in Atlassian’s developer documentation. For more context, read the data privacy guidelines for developers that Atlassian recommends.

Agreeing to a migration

Each Marketplace Partner app has different access scopes. You must review and agree to each Marketplace Partner agreement before they can access your data to migrate.

It’s important to know that:

• only an app with an automated migration path needs you to agree to the migration

• if you agree to third-party migration, you can revoke your agreement at any time

• if you don’t agree to third-party migration, that app can't be migrated using the Confluence Cloud Migration Assistant

• if a Marketplace Partner updates an app, you will need to agree to the migration again

• after you agree to app migration, you can still select Revoke agreement. This will remove your agreement to third-party data migration. To agree again, click View policy and re-confirm your agreement.

Once this is ready, you have completed your app assessment. Click Done to return to the homepage.   

Some quick notes on this table:

• Atlassian’s Cloud Terms of Service and Privacy Policy do not apply to any apps installed on your Cloud site.

• By installing apps on your Cloud site, you agree to the Atlassian Marketplace Terms of Use and the Marketplace Partners privacy policy and terms of use.

• You should review a privacy policy in detail before installing an app in your Cloud site. 

• You can find the privacy policy and terms of use for each app on the app listing in Atlassian Marketplace.

App migration agreement status messages

When you click View policy, you will see a modal that lists the following:

• Access scope of that particular Marketplace Partner

• All the information they will need to access/see in order to migrate this app

There are three links in each modal:

• Atlassian Marketplace Terms of Use (the same for each app)

• The Marketplace Partner Privacy Policy (unique to each app)

• The Marketplace Partner Terms of Use (unique to each app)

We strongly recommend you read each one for each app.

Once this is ready, you have completed your app assessment.
Select Done to return to the homepage.

Pre-migration checks for possible data conflicts in your Cloud site

You can reduce the risk of running into issues, or the migration failing, if you conduct some manual checks in your Server and Cloud sites.

1. Check for group conflicts

Make sure that there are no groups already in your Cloud site with the same name as groups from your Server site, unless you are intentionally trying to merge them.

If we find a group in your Server site that has the same name as a group in your Cloud site (either Jira or Confluence), we will merge the users from the Server group into the Cloud group. The Server group users will inherit the permissions of the Cloud group. This also applies to groups with Jira product access that have the same name as a Confluence group you are migrating. This is because all users and groups are managed in a central location in your Cloud site.

If you don’t want this to happen, you’ll need to make sure all groups across Server and Cloud have unique names before running your migration.

The following groups manage admin access and are blocklisted. They will not be migrated at all:

• site-admins

• system-administrators

• atlassian-addons

• atlassian-addons-admin

Users in these groups will still be migrated, so if you want them to be in one of the blocklisted groups you’ll need to manually add them after migration.

2. Check for space key conflicts

Before migrating, check that there are no spaces with the same space key between your Server and Cloud sites.

If a space from your Server site has the same space key as a space in your Cloud site your migration will fail. This is because every space in Confluence Cloud must have a unique space key. If you find a conflict you can:

• delete duplicate spaces from your Cloud or Server sites

• reset your Cloud site

• choose not to migrate these spaces

If the migration assistant finds a conflict, the space will not migrate.

If a space key conflict is caused by a previous test migration you can reset your cloud site before migrating. Learn how to reset your Confluence Cloud site

3. Review all email domains

Before you migrate, you must review your users' email domains to prevent migrating users from email domains you don’t recognize or trust. This improves the security of your Cloud site. The domains you select here will be applied to all your future migrations.

You can start reviewing your domains from the Migration Assistant home screen. Select Review all email domains. This will take you to the Review all email domains screen.

This screen lists all your email domains with the number of users in each domain. You need to mark all your domains as trusted. This ensures that you migrate users only from the email domains you trust.

For each listed domain, you need to make one of the following three decisions:

You’ll need to review all your email domains and mark them as trusted. You can continue your migration without trusting all the domains, but you won’t be able to run the migration.

Once you've marked all your domains as trusted, select Done to complete the domain review and return to the Migration Assistant home screen.

If you've any previously saved migrations:

1. From the migration dashboard, you can either create a new migration or run an existing migration. A message appears telling you to review your email domains.

2. Select Review domains to review all your email domains and mark them as trusted.

3. Select Continue without reviewing if you want to review your domains later. You can continue without trusting all the domains at this stage, but you won’t be able to run the migration.

4. Migrate your data

There are five key steps to set up and run your migration from Server or Data Center to Cloud. They are:

1. Connect to Cloud

2. Choose what to migrate

3. Check for errors

4. Review your migration

5. Migrate

The sections below describe each step in detail and explain some common errors that you may come across.

To begin migrating your data:

1. On the Migration assistant home screen, select Migrate your data. This takes you to the Migrations dashboard.

2. Select Create new migration. This takes you to the How it works screen.

3. Review the information on this screen, and select Connect to Cloud to continue.

4.a. Connect to your Cloud site

You’ll be asked to add a name for your migration and choose which Cloud site you would like to migrate to. You need to be an admin in both your Server and the destination Cloud sites.

If you have already connected a Cloud site, you should see it in the dropdown. If there is nothing there, you will need to either connect a new Cloud site or sign up for a new Cloud license.

When you’re ready to go, check the box to allow Atlassian to move your data from your Server site to your Cloud site. If you’re unable to grant Atlassian this access, you won’t be able to migrate with the migration assistant and will need to do a space import instead.

If your Confluence Server site is behind a firewall, you'll need to allow access to the domain: atlassian.com. You also might need to allow access to other Atlassian domains. Learn about IP addresses and domains that need to be allowlisted

4.b. Choose what to migrate

You can migrate everything together or break it up into phases.

You can choose:

• spaces (and their attachments), or skip migrating spaces

• attachments only

• all or some of your users and groups from the Confluence directory

• all or some of your spaces (and their attachments)

• all apps that you marked as Needed in Cloud when assessing your apps

Attachments only

You can choose to migrate space attachments before migrating other space data. In general, the more attachments you have, the more downtime you can expect. We recommend that you migrate attachments first. This can help reduce the time window for the remaining space data migration.

When you select Migrate attachments only, this means you can only migrate attachments related to the selected spaces. Learn how migrating attachments only reduces downtime

You will then need to Migrate spaces at a later time. This will restore the links between spaces and their attachments. The migration assistant will recognise any attachments that have already been migrated and skip over these. It will still migrate new attachments, and also remove the links for any attachments that have been deleted. 

Users and groups

You can choose to either migrate all or some of your users.

If you choose to migrate all your users, the first time you do so all your users will be added to your Cloud site. Every migration, after the first, we will just link your data to the users that already exist in Cloud. Learn more about migrating a large userbase

When you migrate your users, they will be added to their groups when they get to Cloud. You will need to review and approve group permissions after you migrate. When you approve group permissions, your users will be given Confluence access and will be added to your bill.

We won’t send an invitation to your users. To invite your users you can choose to send an invitation from the Administration space after you have migrated, or send a link for them to log in themselves.

Other things to be aware of when migrating users and groups:

• We’ve been rolling out changes to user management that may affect your migration experience. From your organisation at admin.atlassian.com, if the Users list and Groups list are under the Directory tab, you have the improved user management experience. This means that the users and groups across sites will be merged under the organisation.

• Users are migrated using email address as the source of truth. On subsequent migrations, the migration assistant will link users by email address rather than re-migrating them. Learn more about migrating a large number of users 

• You must validate all your user accounts (email addresses) before migrating to cloud. Migrating unknown user accounts can potentially allow unauthorized access to your cloud sites. For example, if you had users in your server instance with emails that you don’t own, say “email@example.com”, you might be inviting someone who owns “@example.com” to your site in Cloud.

• Confluence Cloud is subscription-based and billed on a per-user basis. Learn more about available licensing options 

• If you use an external user management system, we recommend synchronizing it with your local directory before migrating. This is to make sure that your users and groups are up to date before you transfer any data.

• Users with disabled status in your Server site will be migrated as active but without any product access. This means they will not be counted as active Confluence users for billing purposes.

• If we find a group in your Server site that has the same name as a group in your cloud site, we will merge the users from the server group into the cloud group.

• Global settings and global site permissions are not migrated with this tool. You’ll need to set these manually after migration.

• If you have users that already exist in your destination cloud site and you choose to migrate users with this app, the following will occur:

  • If a user has product access in Cloud, but has disabled status in your Server site, they will continue to have product access in Cloud after migration.

  • If a user does not have product access in Cloud, but is enabled in your Server site, they will be granted product access through the migration process.

Spaces

If you want to migrate all or some of your spaces choose Migrate spaces from the options. You will then be able to select what spaces you want to migrate. If you aren’t migrating any spaces you will be taken straight to check for errors.

Select the spaces you want to add to your migration. You can filter the list or search for particular spaces, or click Select all if you want to migrate everything at once. You won’t be able to migrate spaces with space keys that already exist in your Confluence Cloud destination site.

If a space has a MIGRATED status, we've detected that you have already migrated this space to the same cloud site.

If a space has a QUEUED status, it has already been added to a migration that is waiting to be run.

When you've chosen all your spaces, select Add to migration. 

Apps

You can choose to migrate all the apps that you marked as ‘Needed in cloud’ while assessing your apps. Or, you can choose not to migrate any apps at this stage.

4.c. Check for errors

In this step, the Confluence Cloud Migration Assistant will review your migration and check for common errors. It will check if:

• your Migration Assistant app is up to date

• users have valid and unique email addresses

• groups will merge through the migration process

• spaces already exist in your Cloud site

• spaces are publicly available and searchable online

• app assessment is complete, or you need to change your app assessment decision

• you need to remove apps from this migration

The table below explains what the symbol next to each listed message means.

Symbol/Message	Description	Action required
	A green tick means that the check has passed.	Proceed to the next step in your migration.
	A yellow warning means that you can continue, but you need to be aware of a potential issue.	Expand the error and warning messages to reveal more details and links.
	A red error means that you need to resolve the error before you can run your migration.	Expand the error and warning messages to reveal more details and links.

Understand the ‘Check’ messages

• System: The table below lists errors and warning messages related to the Confluence Cloud Migration Assistant version.

Users and groups errors

All users will need to have a valid and unique email address. If we detect invalid emails or multiple users with the same email, you will get an error. You will need to fix these email addresses before you can run your migration.

If you have chosen to migrate all users, we will check to see if you have any groups with the same name already in your Cloud site. If we find groups with the same name, we will merge the users from the Server group into the Cloud group with the same name. You can continue with your migration without fixing this issue, but it’s important to check that this won’t cause permission escalation.

Space errors

If you’re migrating spaces we will check to see if there will be any space key conflicts. If you get an error you can:

• delete duplicate spaces from your Cloud or Server sites

• reset your Cloud site

• choose not to migrate these spaces by removing them from your migration

You will need to resolve any space key conflicts before you can run your migration.

App-specific pre-migration errors / warnings

The table below lists errors and warning messages related to apps.

If you decide to Continue and fix later, you can come back to view the errors once you have saved your migration.

App Vendor Checks

App vendor checks allow app vendors (Marketplace Partners) to run pre-migration checks on the apps that you’ve selected as ‘Needed in cloud’ while assessing your apps. The App vendor check screen displays warnings if issues are detected with the app data migration. The specific app vendor also displays clear instructions on how to resolve any issues that they detect with your apps.

We strongly recommend that you follow the instructions app vendors have provided to resolve potential issues, and re-run the app migration check.

Note: Atlassian does not run app vendor checks, and you need to contact the specific app vendor for support with any issues related to their app.

How to use App vendor checks

1. On the ‘Check for errors’ screen, expand the ‘App vendor check’ warning message.

2. Select ‘View all app vendor checks’. This displays the ‘App vendor checks’ screen. If app vendors have run checks on your apps, they are displayed on this screen.

4.d. Review your migration

This is the final step in setting up your migration.

If everything looks correct and you want to start your migration, click Run. If you would like to start your migration later or you still have errors to fix, click Save. If you choose to run your migration, it will still be saved to your dashboard. There, you can view the progress and details of all your migrations.

4.e. Manage and run your migrations

Your saved migration will be listed on the migration dashboard, where you can view details or run it. You can also check the status of a migration, monitor the progress, stop a migration that's currently running, or create a new one.

You can create as many migrations as you need. At this time, migrations can't be edited or deleted, so if you create a migration that can't be used, just create a new one.

Status definitions

After migrating

Depending on the type of migration, there may be some things you need to do once your migration is finished.

Users and groups

To make sure your users and groups are set up correctly:

• Review members of groups and approve their permissions by going to Review imported groups. (If you have the Free plan, permissions can’t be modified; users and groups retain the same permissions that they had on your original site.)

• Add users to the generic groups if necessary. The generic groups are: "site-admins", "system-administrators", "atlassian-addons", "atlassian-addons-admin".

• If you use an external user management system, check that your users have synced correctly.

• When you are ready, invite your users. Go to Administration > Users > Show details and then Resend invite. When they first log in they may be prompted to set a new password and add personal details.

Spaces

After migrating spaces, it may take a while for them to appear in the space directory. However, you can still access them via a direct link.

To check that your spaces have migrated successfully:

• Review content and spaces, or ask your users to review their own content.

• Check for any instances of Former User. This means that we were unable to match content to a user.

• Link your other Atlassian products by going to Settings > Application links.

• Use the Jira macro repair to update any links to Jira. On your Cloud site go to Settings > Jira macro repair and follow the steps.

Apps

Within the migration page, you can now see an App section to monitor the progress of app migration. From this progress tracker, you can monitor the progress of the data migration of each app, and review the statuses as the migration completes.

The table below explains the various progress statuses for app migration.

Additional actions

You can also perform the following additional actions:

• convert pages in the legacy editor to the new editor. Learn how to convert pages

• install any apps you wish to use and onboard your users.

For the full overview of post-migration actions check out the Cloud migration guide. 

More information and support

We’ve a number of channels available to help you with your migration.

• for migration planning information, go to the Atlassian Migration Program website

• for technical issues or support with strategy and best practices, get in touch with our support team

• for peer advice, ask the Atlassian Community

• for expert guidance, work with an Atlassian Partner

Support for Atlassian Server products ends in February, 2024. Learn more about the Server end of support timeline.