Manage backup and restore with sharding

When you provision an Atlassian product, we distribute the product’s data across a set of partitions or shards. This results in improved performance because we split the data into smaller, easier-to-manage pieces and store them in multiple shards. Each shard has only a part of the data, so when you look for something, you only have to search through a smaller amount of information, making it quicker to find what you need.

How we back up and restore with shards

When you take a backup of a product, we store the backup file in a shard within a region. We can restore the backup to a product instance that is stored in the same shard within the same region. We don’t support cross-shard backup and restore.

If the backup file and the product instance to which you’re restoring are in two different shards, you need to move the product instance to the same shard as the backup file. Moving this data may take up to 30 minutes, but it won’t affect your data or compliance.

To restore data to a product instance on the same shard as the backup:

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

2. Select Settings > Data management > Backup and restore.

3. From the Restore tab, select the product you want to restore, then select Next.

4. Select the specific backup you want to restore from the list of available backups for the product. If no backups are available, create a backup policy and run a backup.

5. Review your backup. If the backup includes attachments, select whether you want to restore them, then select Next.

6. Select where to restore the product data. If you don’t see any products, it’s because of two reasons:

   • You can only restore a backup into a product that doesn’t contain any data. Select the Contain data filter and select No.

   • We can restore data to a product that’s on the same shard as the backed-up product. This means that if the backup file and the product to which you’re restoring your data are in different shards, we’ll move the product to the shard where the backup exists. This is an additional step and the data move may take around 30 minutes. You can select and unselect the Show products in the backup’s shard checkbox to see products that are in the same or different shards.

7. If there are no products in the same shard as the backup but you still want to restore, select Next to proceed to the next step.

8. Validate data by checking if there could be potential problems before and after you restore. Resolve any problems.

9. Review the data to restore, then select Restore. Once the restore starts running, it’s added to the Restore table.