Moving from Confluence 3.3.1 server to Confluence cloud
Asked by Edmund Woo:

Hi All,

I've come to the community for help with a really old version of Confluence server.

The short of it:

I am running Confluence 3.3.1 server and I want to migrate the three spaces to Confluence Cloud.

The long of it:

I'm currently running Confluence 3.3.1 on a stand alone computer at home on Windows 7 as a personal wiki with only me as the user. I run the apache service whenever I need access to Confluence. Recently I started looking into moving it to Confluence cloud But the requirements for cloud migration says it can only migrate from version 5.14 or later.

So is the ONLY option available to me is to follow the upgrade path from 3.3.1 to 3.5.17 to 5.03 to 5.14 before I can migrate everything over to Confluence cloud? I am hesitant in doing this because if there are any hiccups along the way and I lose access to the information, I'm screwed. Of course I will perform a backup before doing this upgrade. And I probably will export each space too.

Is there a way to either export each space and just import it into a later version? Or to just install the latest version and restore from an archive?

Or is there some way of creating some sort of export, and import it into the cloud? I know nothing is ever that simple, but I want to hear what the experts have to say.

I seem to recall hearing a long time ago that the dbase format is different in the later versions than the older versions? And I have to convert the dbase into a different format or something? I don't have the foggiest idea as to how to do that if I need to.

Thanks in advanced.


Answers:
author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: Hi Edmund,

I'm afraid you are a bit stuck here. Confluence 3 can export spaces to various formats, including one that can be imported into other Confluence systems.

Confluence Server and Cloud can import pages from a couple of formats directly, and it can accept exported spaces from other Confluences. For Cloud imports, there's also the Confluence Cloud Migration Assistant which lets you "migrate" everything or individual spaces without having to do any exporting.

But, the data storage was completely rewritten in version 4, and you can't import version 3.x exports into 4+ without losing most, if not all, the clever things you might have done in your content - the most you'll get is the page content, with basic formatting, attachments, and a pile of boxes on pages saying "can't handle this". 5+ won't read anything from a 3.x export.

The upgrade from 3 to 4 converts all your pages to the new storage format, so an export from 4.x is a similar shape to later server versions, but Cloud can't import from anything under 6.15

So, you've really got 3 options to explore:

* Upgrade the server to 6.15 and use the CCMA, or export space
  * (If your data is very simple, no complex apps, not many macros, etc, you may get away with only upgrading to v4 - there's a way to trick later confluences into accepting lower version exports, if they are simple)
* Copy and paste what you need
* Export the pages or spaces to another format (HTML or XML are built in, or if you could do page by page, word exports!) and write something that can parse, convert, and post their content into Cloud via the REST API

comments: author: Edmund Woo
body: Hi Nic,

Thank you for the detailed response. I really appreciate it. It IS alot to mull over. There is nothing fancy in the pages, simple header and footer macros that aren't important. Maybe a tasklist here and there. But it's the content that I'm more concerned about along with any pics I've attached to pages.

I believe there are just about a hundred or two hundred pages altogether. I had also thought about just recreating the pages one at a time by copying the markup over to the cloud, that would easy enough to do...I would think. I will test out how that would go with two of the spaces that only has a few dozen pages each. That would ensure I still have Confluence up and running while recreating the pages in the Cloud.

I'll keep thinking about it for the next few days and see what path to take. Lots to think about. Thanks again for your help and insights!

Edited: I just realized that I'll lose all the comments if I just do a copy and paste of the markup. Hmmm, more to think about.


Tags: cloud

confluence-cloud