Which files are required at minimum to back up Confluence?

• A. <conf-home>/confluence.cfg.xml and <conf-home>/attachments.
• B. The whole home directory
• C. Only the database
• D. Only the logs

Answer: (A)

Backing up Confluence effectively focuses on preserving what cannot be easily rebuilt by the software itself: the essential configuration and the files users have uploaded. The minimal file-system backup you need is the Confluence Home’s configuration file and the attachments directory. The confluence.cfg.xml file stores key settings that tell Confluence how to run and connect to its environment, so having that file is necessary to restore an instance with the same runtime behavior. The attachments directory contains all the files users have uploaded to pages, blogs, and comments; without these, restored pages would be missing their media and documents.

The rest of the Confluence Home directory (like logs, caches, and temporary files) isn’t required to recreate the instance, since those can be regenerated or are not essential to a functional restore. However, the actual content and configuration rely on the database and the attachments; a separate database backup is still needed to recover the page data and metadata.