Migrate Jira projects

This use case describes how you can migrate Jira issues from a project on one Jira to another. This can be helpful when:

• Your company has recently acquired another company which also uses Jira and you want to merge both Jiras into one.
• Different departments of your company use their own Jira instance and you want to consolidate them into one.

With Backbone, you can migrate issue data between projects on Jira instances. To help with the transition, you can give the team access to both Jira projects for a time - Backbone keeps the issues in sync. 

To maintain separate Jira instances, but continuously synchronize information between certain projects, check out bidirectional synchronization.

Configuration Guide

With Backbone, you can synchronize all issue data in a project from one Jira instance to another. To do this, you can configure a unidirectional synchronization from the Jira project on your source Jira instance to the one on the target.

1. Since Backbone does not synchronize the project configuration data, manually create your target project or use another app to migrate the project configuration.
2. After creating the target project, create a new synchronization.
3. Then you can configure all the details. We recommend you to synchronize all information unidirectionally.
   • Start with issue types and field mappings
   • Optionally, extend the synchronization with comments and attachments.

Congratulations! The basic configuration is now complete.

Good to know

• You need a Backbone license and installation on any Jira Instance with which you want to synchronize.

• The project configuration must be migrated either manually or automatically using another app.
  
• The issue key in the target Jira project may not be the same as the key in the source Jira project. This is because Backbone can't recognize if issues in the source Jira project were deleted or an error occurred when importing issues into the target Jira project. However, you can store the issue key from the source Jira project in a custom field in the target Jira project so you can preserve the information, see also our docs for the correlationFieldId.
• The history in the target instance will not look exactly the same as in the source. Read more how the issue history is handled.
• If you have many issues to migrate, we recommend to not synchronize all in one go, but rather in chunks. You can use the "Limit issues" functionality for that.
• If you want to do a soft migration, so that people can work in both projects for a while, you could use bidirectional synchronization instead of unidirectional or combine them.