Atlassian ships Backup and Restore with Jira and Confluence on Premium and Enterprise plans. It was built for full-site recovery, so when an instance disappears, you can restore it.
Most real incidents do not look like that. They look like a bulk edit at 2:47 PM nobody catches until the next morning. Or an automation rule that quietly overwrites a field in 2,000 tickets. Or an automation that was deleted two weeks after an admin rotation.
This post walks through where each tool fits, and where layering Rewind on top closes a gap Atlassian’s Backup and Restore was never designed to close.
What Atlassian’s Backup and Restore was designed for
Atlassian built Backup and Restore for one kind of failure: A wide, recent, full-site event. A cloud region goes dark. An account gets terminated. A migration rolls back the wrong way.
The scope reflects that design. Atlassian’s backup feature is only available for Premium and Enterprise plans. Jira sites with over 300 GB of data or with over 7 million attachments, or Confluence sites with over 3 GB of data, cannot be backed up in their entirety.
The only restores available are at the instance level. There is no granular recovery path.
Atlassian RPO and RTO
- RPO (Recovery Point Objective) = the amount of data you could lose in a worst case scenario. Atlassian Backup and Restore’s RPO is 24 hours.
- RTO (Recovery Time Objective) = how long it takes to get the application back up and running. Atlassian’s RTO is 12 hours. Retention is 30 days.
Two changes in 2026 shifted the conversation for admins:
On March 30, 2026, Atlassian deprecated the v1 Backup Manager API. Admins who scripted exports against that API lost the path they had relied on. On April 29, 2026, Atlassian Cloud Backup and Restore exited open beta and became a paid add-on. Standard-tier automation is gone. Admins on Standard plans lost Atlassian-maintained automation entirely.
Where the real incidents live
The most common data loss scenarios impact a single ticket or page or automation. They rarely require a full-site rebuild, which is all that Atlassian can offer.
73% of organizations report that Jira outages directly impact delivery timelines, and 69% require Jira recovery within one to four hours (Rewind SaaS Resilience Report, Q4 2025). A 12-hour RTO from Atlassian does not fit that window.
Only 40% of organizations have a defined RTO for Jira at all, so the gap is often invisible until the data disaster happens.
The threat picture adds another layer. In 94% of ransomware attacks, cybercriminals attempted to compromise the victim’s backups during the attack (Sophos, 2024 State of Ransomware). A backup that lives inside the platform under attack is a single point of failure.
The cost of getting this wrong is not small. Downtime averages $9,000 per minute for Global 2000 companies (Splunk, “The Hidden Costs of Downtime”). Across the market, 54% of organizations report their most recent significant outage cost more than $100,000. One in five crossed a million dollars.
Inside a single Jira outage, the damage spreads across the team. Productivity drops for 90% of them. Stress hits 77.5%. SLAs slip for 62.5%.
Where Rewind was designed to sit
Rewind is a SaaS resilience platform built on independent architecture. It is a platform, not a plugin. The data sits outside the vendor surface, so a compromise on Atlassian does not compromise the recovery path.
Rewind is an Atlassian Silver Marketplace Partner, Cloud Fortified for Jira and Confluence. Rewind is the #1 most-downloaded Jira and Confluence backup app on the Atlassian Marketplace.
Rewind is built for the recovery needs Atlassian’s Backup and Restore was not designed to cover:
- Granular restore. Recover a single ticket, page, file, or configuration. Restores are non-destructive, so the rest of the system is not touched.
- Sub-24-hour RPO. If governance requires a four-hour recovery point, a 24-hour window does not meet that requirement.
- Retention beyond 30 days. Regulatory audits, contract disputes, and policy windows routinely run past 30 days.
- Cross-instance restore. Recover data to a different account or instance. This matters for failover, staging, sandbox seeding, and emergency fallback.
- Protection from your own AI. Rewind does not have AI products. Rewind’s backup and restore product protects your SaaS data from errors introduced by your own AI agents, automations, and AI-assisted workflows.
- Sites above Atlassian’s caps. Jira over 300 GB and Confluence over 32 GB fall outside the supported scope.
- Independent architecture against ransomware. When the vendor surface is compromised, a backup stored inside that surface is compromised with it. An independent platform keeps the recovery path outside the blast radius.
One more detail on Confluence worth flagging: Deleted pages stay in the space trash until someone manually purges them. Deleted spaces are auto-purged after 60 days, a policy Atlassian introduced on January 6, 2025. Page history and trash are not a backup.
The principle behind all of this is the 3-2-1 backup rule for SaaS. Three copies of your data, in two different cloud locations, one of which is not your SaaS provider.
Rewind also ships failover-ready capabilities, which are predefined options that keep humans in control while minimizing disruption. Hot Standby for Jira is scheduled for Q2 2026, a pre-synced secondary Jira instance in a different region. Pilot Light for Jira is scheduled for Q3 2026, a Rewind-hosted read-only reproduction of vital Jira data. Both are publicly announced. Timelines are subject to change.
Admins describe the gap in plain language: “We knew Atlassian provides limited data backup coverage, but that doesn’t extend to backup of account-level data in GitHub and Jira,” says Eran Polak, R&D Manager at Matics. “We have a requirement to maintain daily data backups for everything we do in engineering. That is just not feasible with SaaS,” says Jeremy Neyhart, Engineering Manager at Lutron.
Rewind offers three-click onboarding. The core product covers more than 16 integrations. The independent architecture gives you a recovery surface the vendor cannot take down.
Three checks for your next platform review
First, confirm your site fits inside Atlassian’s supported scope, either a Premium or Enterprise plan. Jira under 300 GB. Confluence under 32 GB. Retention need inside 30 days. RPO tolerance inside 24 hours. Score each as fits or does not fit.
Second, run a tabletop exercise on four scenarios that happen at instances with 500 or more users. An accidental bulk edit of 500 to 2,000 issues. A deleted automation rule after an admin rotation. A single Confluence page an auditor wants as of a date 45 days back. A permissions scheme overwritten during migration. For each, ask whether Atlassian’s Backup and Restore answers the question without touching anything else.
Third, send the results to your Platform Owner and your IT Finance partner. Attach one question: Where do we want the floor, and where do we want the layer?
Learn more about Rewind for Jira at rewind.com/jira.
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