Yes, AvePoint backs up Confluence. AvePoint provides automated, full-fidelity backup for pages, spaces, attachments, comments, blogs, and permissions, with granular, non-destructive restore and retention set by policy. This closes the gaps in Atlassian’s native recovery, which is all-or-nothing, retention-limited, and manually triggered.
Key Takeaways
- AvePoint backs up Confluence. It protects pages, spaces, attachments, comments, blogs, and permissions, with granular, non-destructive restore.
- Native Confluence backup is real but limited. It offers short retention, all-or-nothing restore, manual scheduling.
- Service outages can impact recovery timelines. Atlassian’s own April 2022 outage deleted 775 customers’ Confluence and Jira sites for up to two weeks. No permanent data loss, but zero control over the recovery timeline.
- AvePoint extends retention flexibility. It provides a default seven-year retention period that can be adjusted to align with your compliance needs, versus a native window measured in days.
- Confluence rarely runs alone. AvePoint backs it up alongside Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace under one platform.
- AI relies on the content stored in Confluence. AI assistants like Copilot and Gemini surface whatever’s in Confluence, so a backup gap becomes an AI answer-quality gap too.
- Restore readiness matters. Test your restore process before an incident forces you to test it live.
Why Does Confluence Need Independent Backup?
Confluence needs independent backup because Atlassian’s native recovery is all-or-nothing, retention-limited, and slow to run, so an accidental deletion or corruption can cost a team its documentation with no fast, surgical way to get it back.
On April 5, 2022, a routine maintenance script at Atlassian ran against the wrong ID type. It used site IDs where it should have used app IDs, and instead of deactivating one deprecated marketplace app, it deleted 883 full Jira and Confluence Cloud sites, roughly 775 customers, outright.
Some of those organizations didn’t get their Confluence spaces back until April 18, leaving them without access to every page, decision record, and onboarding doc for up to two weeks. Atlassian’s own post-incident review confirms that no data was permanently lost: Its internal recovery point objective (RPO) of one hour was met, and most customers were restored within five minutes of the deletion. But for those two weeks, recovery ran entirely on Atlassian’s timeline, not the customer’s.
- Accidental deletion. A user deletes a page, space, or key attachment, and permissions or limited trash retention can prevent recovering it.
- Broken embedded content. Attachments or macros referenced by Jira or other tools get deleted or corrupted, and documentation becomes incomplete or misleading.
- All-or-nothing native restore. Confluence’s Backup Manager restores an entire site, not a single page, so fixing one deletion means overwriting everything else too.
- Limited native retention. Atlassian’s own backup window is measured in days, not years, which fails most compliance and audit requirements outright
- Misconfigured retention rules. Poorly configured automations, retention rules in Content Manager or the recycle bin could trigger the unintended deletion of Confluence data.
How Does AvePoint Back Up Confluence?
AvePoint backs up Confluence with full-fidelity, automated protection covering pages, spaces, attachments, comments, blogs, and user permissions, restoring a single page, blog, or entire space as a new object instead of overwriting what’s already there.
- What’s protected: Cover not only the Confluence’s own Backup Manager content (pages, users, attachments) but also pages, spaces, attachments, comments, blogs, and user permissions
- Restore: Granular and non-destructive recovery of an individual page, blog, or an entire space as a new space (with a timestamp suffix), so nothing currently live gets overwritten
- Backup frequency: Automated, running up to four times a day for a low RPO, no manual export cycle required
- Retention: Default to seven years and can be adjusted up or down to match compliance needs, instead of a native retention window measured in days
- Reporting: Centralized management and automated reporting give audit-ready proof of backup and restore activity, cutting the manual tracking native tools leave to the admin
How Does AvePoint’s Confluence Backup Compare to Native Recovery?
AvePoint’s Confluence backup differs from Atlassian’s native recovery primarily in restore granularity, retention length, and management overhead: native recovery is an all-or-nothing, short-retention, manually triggered process, while AvePoint restores at the page or space level on a retention schedule set by the organization.
| Capability | Confluence Native | AvePoint |
| Data protected | Pages, users, and attachments (Backup Manager) | Pages, spaces, attachments, comments, blogs, and permissions |
| Restore | Site-level/space-level import only; overwrites existing data. Pages restored from trash; once a page is purged from trash it can never be recovered. All attachments are purged along with pages and spaces. | Granular, non-destructive; restores as a new page, blog, or space |
| Retention | Manual configuration. 30 Days (Backup Manager) Atlassian automatically purges data older than 60 days in the trash. | Defaults to 7 years, adjustable to your compliance needs |
| Backup frequency | Once Daily (Backup Manager) | Automated, up to 4 times a day |
| Granularity | No item-level restore | Item-level: restore a single page, blog, or space |
| Management overhead | High: manual scheduling and complex import/overwrite process | Low: centralized management and audit-ready reporting |
What Does This Mean for Confluence Alongside Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace?
Confluence rarely runs alone. Most organizations pair it with Microsoft 365 (SharePoint, Teams) or Google Workspace, and both have native recovery gaps of their own. AvePoint backs up Confluence alongside Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Salesforce, and other SaaS applications on a single platform, so recovery is managed under one tool, one retention policy, and one restore process at a time.
Treating Confluence backup as a standalone project misses the point. An IT team managing recovery for Confluence, SharePoint, Teams, and Google Drive under separate native recovery windows is carrying separate sets of retention rules and restore limitations for every platform, not one.
How Does AI Search and Copilot Change the Stakes of Confluence Data Loss?
As organizations connect Confluence content to AI assistants like Copilot or Gemini for search and summarization, a gap in the knowledge base, a wiped space, a missing decision record, doesn’t just inconvenience one person. It silently changes what the AI assistant retrieves and cites for everyone who asks it a question afterward.
A backup gap in Confluence used to be a recovery problem. Once that content feeds an AI assistant’s answers, it’s also a data-quality problem for every answer the assistant gives.
Confluence Backup Maturity Tiers
| Tier | What It Looks Like |
| Tier 1: Native only | Relying solely on Atlassian’s short retention, all-or-nothing recovery. No granular restore. Recovery timeline is entirely vendor-controlled. |
| Tier 2: Partial coverage | Native backup supplemented by manual exports or scripts for a few critical spaces. Some granularity, no automation, inconsistent retention. |
| Tier 3: AvePoint-backed, multiplatform | Automated backup with page- and space-level restore, retention set by policy rather than a native default, and coverage extended across Confluence, Jira, Microsoft 365, and Google Workspace under one platform. |
AvePoint backs up Confluence and Jira alongside Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, and Salesforce on a single platform, with page- and space-level restore and retention set by your organization, not by default.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Confluence Cloud back up my data automatically?
Atlassian’s native Backup Manager covers pages, users, and attachments, but restores are all-or-nothing at the site level, and retention is limited to a matter of days.
Can I restore a single deleted Confluence page without restoring the whole site?
Native Confluence restore is all-or-nothing at the site level. AvePoint restores a single page, blog, or space on its own, as a new object, without touching the rest of the site.
What is the difference between Confluence Data Center backup and Confluence Cloud backup?
Confluence Data Center backup is self-managed through the Backup Manager and is run manually, with a wait period between full backups. Confluence Cloud backup is Atlassian-managed, with limited retention and no self-serve schedule.
Does AvePoint’s Confluence backup replace Atlassian’s native backup or work alongside it?
AvePoint’s Confluence backup works alongside Atlassian’s native backup, closing the retention and granularity gaps native recovery leaves open rather than replacing it outright.
What does Confluence backup mean for Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace recovery
Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace have native recovery limitations similar to Confluence’s. AvePoint backs up all three on a single platform, so recovery isn’t managed separately for each application.
How often should I test a Confluence restore?
Test a Confluence restore at least quarterly and align the schedule with an organization’s audit or compliance review cycle to keep recovery evidence current.
What other developer tools does AvePoint provide Backup and Recovery for?
AvePoint backs up many other tools critical to developers throughout the SDLC. We protect Azure DevOps, Github, JIRA, Confluence, Salesforce Metadata, Microsoft Power Platform and much more.
Related Questions
→ What is the 3-2-1 backup rule?
→ Does AvePoint back up Jira?
→ What is RTO and RPO in SaaS backup?
→ How does ransomware affect Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace recovery?
→ What is the shared responsibility model for SaaS data?
Grace Harrison is a Product Marketing Manager at AvePoint, Inc., based in Jersey City, NJ. She works in the Product Strategy department, contributing to solutions like AvePoint Cloud Backup, AvePoint Fly, and AvePoint tyGraph. Grace plays a key role in developing marketing strategies and competitive intelligence to support AvePoint's field teams and enhance their selling tools.