A QA lead opens Xray on a Monday morning to find a test plan missing half its tests. Nobody touched it, as far as anyone can tell. A bulk operation ran over the weekend, and some of the links between tests, preconditions, and plans didn’t survive. There’s no error in the log. There’s just less test suite than there was on Friday.
Xray’s test data is part of your Jira estate just as much as any native Jira issue, even though it lives in its own relationship model. Rewind’s Q4 2025 SaaS Resilience Report found that 69% of organizations require Jira recovery within 1 to 4 hours, yet half of large enterprises with that mandate have no solution in place and the other half rely on manual recovery processes. Xray data loss is a quieter version of the same problem: nothing about Jira looks broken, but the thing your team uses to verify every release is missing pieces.
Xray’s relationships aren’t simple
Xray doesn’t store test data the way Jira stores an issue. Tests, Preconditions, Test Plans, and Test Sets are cross-linked in a dense web, built up over months or years of release cycles. A precondition belongs to a dozen tests. A test belongs to several plans. None of that structure is native Jira parent-child, it’s Xray’s own relationship model, layered on top.
That’s exactly what makes it fragile. A bad script, a bulk operation, or a simple mistake can sever those links without touching the underlying issues at all. The tests are still there. The plan they belonged to just isn’t pointing at them anymore. From the outside, nothing looks wrong until someone goes looking for a specific test and can’t find it where it should be.
What’s actually covered
Standard Jira backup and restore, which Rewind already provides, protects native Jira data: the issues, fields, comments, attachments. Xray’s relationship layer sits outside that. Restoring Jira on its own puts the issues back. It doesn’t rebuild which test belonged to which plan.
To be specific about scope: Rewind now backs up and restores Tests (steps, type, folder), Preconditions, Test Plans, and Test Sets, along with the relationships between them.
Restore is available at the item level or the full suite. Restore one test, and it lands back inside the plans and sets it belonged to, structure intact. Restore your backed-up data, and every relationship rebuilds automatically, in the right order. Backup runs on the same schedule as your parent Jira instance, so Xray and Jira data always reflect the same point in time, and it inherits your Jira instance’s encryption and Cloud Sync automatically, no separate setup required.
Getting connected
1. Connect Xray as an add-on under your existing Jira instance in Rewind, using an Xray Client ID and Client Secret you generate from your Xray settings.
2. Rewind begins daily backups automatically, synced to your Jira instance’s schedule.
3. When you need to restore, browse the Xray vault, search for what you need, and restore it in place.
No separate charge, no separate configuration for encryption or storage. It’s included in Rewind Backups for Jira Advanced and Enterprise.
Connect Xray to Rewind Backups for Jira.
Subscribe to Retro for more on what we’re building next.
