Reference

Scope

This document presents the format of the Confluence export packages. It is targeted at:

• technical people working on Confluence migration tools or tools involving Confluence exports
• technical people running migrations who need to deeply investigate some issues
• people curious about the Confluence export format

Introduction

In 2026, Atlassian has been phasing out Confluence XML backups on Confluence Cloud. CSV backups replace them.

Like a Confluence XML package, a Confluence CSV package is a zip file. It contains, among other things, an attachments folder and a CSV file per database table (with a csv.gz extension - mind you, that doesn't always mean they are actually gzipped, see below). While the Confluence XML backup is a hibernate dump, where what's exported is serialized java objects (more or less), CSV files are more directly what's stored in the RDBMS (so for instance if you have ever looked at a PostgresSQL instance containing Confluence server stuff, these CSV file will look quite familiar). Also contrary to Confluence XML backups, there doesn't seem to be an exportDescriptor.properties file: of course, we know where a CSV export comes from: Atlassian's Confluence Cloud.

Like for Confluence XML exports, there are two types of CSV bakups we know about:

• A space backup package, produced from the settings of a space in Confluence.
• A site backup package, produced from the global administration in Confluence. It contains all the  spaces, as well as users and groups, but it doesn't necessarily contain the attachments folder.

At the time of writing, there are a few major differences between the site export and the space export, effectively making them slightly different formats.

1. About the CSV tables:
   • In space backups, the CSV files are at the root of the ZIP archive, and despite their .csv.gz extension, are not actually gzipped, they are stored plain text! (so, on many operating systems, double clicking on them will fail, because your OS will try to gunzip it and of course it can't work.
   • In site backups, they are indeed gzipped, and they are in a data folder.
2. About the attachment folder:
   • In space backups, the attachments folder is structured like in Confluence XML backups: an attachment is found at attachments/<stable page id>/<stable attachment id>/<version number>
   • In site backups, an attachment is found at attachments/<uuid> where uuid is given by the FILESTORE_ID property (provided in contentproperties.csv.gz) of the attachment revision record (defined in content.csv.gz) 
3. About the whiteboards folder: only found in site exports. We haven't looked into the whiteboards yet.
4. About the metadata.json file: only found in site exports. It's the somewhat spiritual replacement of the exportDescriptor.properties file found in XML backups. It provides a list of the .csv.gz files in the archive with their sizes in bytes, and some stuff like the backup id, account id, the cloud instance id, things probably mostly relevant to Atlassian's setup. Notably absent from this file would be a backup date. We don't currently use this file.

Description of the CSV tables