Copy production data to sandbox

When you copy your production data to a sandbox, some data types aren’t copied. Learn what data is copied to sandbox

Copy all spaces or projects

When you copy data from your production environment to its sandbox, we’ll replace the existing data in your sandbox with the newly copied data. Every new data copy will overwrite any existing data in your sandbox.

To copy data from your production environment to its sandbox:

1. Go to admin.atlassian.com. Select your organization if you have more than one.

2. Select Products > Sandbox.

3. Under Actions in the product table, select Copy production data.

4. Choose Copy data with attachments or Copy data without attachments.

5. Review the data to be copied.

6. Select Copy data.

Copy specific spaces or projects

When you select specific projects or spaces from your production environment to copy to its sandbox, we’ll copy only the selected data to the sandbox. This will result in shorter completion times and minimize the risk of errors.

To copy specific spaces and or projects from your production to its sandbox:

1. Go to admin.atlassian.com. Select your organization if you have more than one.

2. Select Products > Sandbox.

3. Under Actions in the product table, select Copy production data.

4. Follow the steps to select Specific projects or Specific spaces.

5. If you want to see attachments in your sandbox, select Include attachments.
   Depending on whether you are on centralized user management or original user management, your experience of granting users and groups access to the sandbox will differ. Find out which user management experience you have

6. Depending on whether your organization is on original user management, select if you want to Preserve group memberships in your sandbox.

7. Run the Validation.

8. Review the data to be copied.

9. Select Copy data.

Preserve group membership

We’ll copy the users along with their respective groups in the sandbox. If a group with the same name as a copied group already exists in your sandbox, we’ll merge the two groups will merge. Consequently, if the users are new to the sandbox, they will automatically acquire the permissions of the existing sandbox group. This means that users may inherit permissions that may not be desired.

Validate data

Before copying your selection, we validate to confirm that your sandbox is correctly set up for your data copy and to identify potential conflicts or unwanted settings.

If the checks resulted in any warnings or errors, you’ll need to resolve them before you can run your data copy.

What we check:

• Whether projects or spaces with a duplicate name already exist in your sandbox
  All projects or spaces on your sandbox must have unique names and project or space keys after the data copy. This includes the history of any changed or old project/ space keys. If duplicate projects or spaces are found, you’ll need to delete the duplicate projects on your sandbox or remove the duplicate projects or spaces from your selection.

• Whether any spaces are available to the public
  We copy space permissions as they’re configured on your production. In some cases, your space permissions may allow public access, which means anyone on the internet can access your Confluence spaces and related data in the sandbox after they’ve been copied. If you don’t want to allow people to access this data in your sandbox without logging in, update the permissions on your production before the data copy.

• Whether projects have invalid filters
  Before you start copying data to your Jira Sandbox, we check if there are any invalid or missing board filters. If we find invalid or missing filters you need to add a valid filter to your project board or, if you don't have a valid filter, create a new one and then add it to your project board.

• Whether there are groups with same name on the sandbox
  We run this check only if you chose to preserve membership. We’ll check if there are groups with the same names on the destination.

Users and groups

When you copy new data into a sandbox, users and groups merge with the data you have in the sandbox.

Time taken to copy data

Depending on the size of your data, the data copy from production to your sandbox can take up to 14 days. The larger the size of the data being copied over, the longer it will take. We'll send you an email when it’s complete.

Copy data for Jira family of products

If you have Jira, and Jira Service Management sandboxes linked through the same URL, data will be copied for all the Jira sandboxes (excluding features powered by Opsgenie) because they are built on the platform. This could result in incident links not displaying like they would in production.

Feedback

We're working on a more streamlined data copy for sandboxes, and we’d appreciate any feedback on what is important to you with data copy to sandboxes. Leave feedback at sandbox environment for cloud.