kasia in a nutshell

A few months ago, I posted an entry asking about bug tracking tools. A few people recommended JIRA and after evalutation, showing it off to our team and a happy gleam at the price tag we purchased an enterprise license and have been using it ever since. It's really a great tool and likely the best bug tracking one I've ever used.

Months went by.. project has grown and today was the day to move our bug tracking to a newer, faster non-ppc based server. Since JIRA is Java-based, the move is really nothing more than tar and un-tar.. what could be easier? We're just hopping linux boxes here!

As with any project, a test run is required, so of course about a week ago (September 1st to be exact) a tar of JIRA was created, un-tar'ed on the new server and tested to make sure all runs.. And it did! Like a charm.. piece of cake.

Today.. the moving day. All I had to do was create a fresh, new tar and un-tar it (yet again) on the new server.. what could be easier!

tar -xzvf jira.tgz jira-directory

Yah.. I typed "x" instead of "c" and of course.. there was already the previously tar'ed file (from September 1st) there and since I was pulled into a meeting as soon as I hit "enter" I didn't even notice this.. that is.. until I brought up JIRA on the new server and saw all the missing data.

Ahh!! Blew away a week's worth of work! What's worse.. not even my own work but that of other people!

This is where the love of JIRA comes in.. the default configuration backs up its data every 12 hours into xml files.. and since the file has the date in the name, the new backup files were not over-written when un-tar'ing the old files over the location..

Thank you.. oh blessed JIRA developers you saved my back-up-deficient ass!
(Yah, we'll be backing up the new server regularly).