Copying a space

A second space with the same pages — and the things Confluence’s own copy leaves behind.

What it’s for

Sometimes you don’t want a template, you want that space, again. Archiving a project and starting a fresh copy. Splitting a team. Making a sandbox of a real space.

How to do it

Open Space Factory’s settings — Space Factory in Confluence’s admin area under Apps, or admin.atlassian.com → your site → Connected apps → Space Factory → Configure — and pick Copy a space; or open the space’s own settings if your admin allows space admins to copy their spaces.
Pick the space, give the copy a name and a key.
Choose what comes along: attachments, labels, page restrictions, page settings and macros, comments, blog posts, the description and space labels.
Decide whether the copy gets the same people and groups as the original. If not, only you and Confluence admins can get into it until you add people.
Press Check what will be copied, read the report, then copy.

What the report tells you first

Anything that can’t happen, before any counts: pages Space Factory can’t read, and a key that’s already taken. Then the counts, the time, and the notes about how comments and blog posts are copied.

What makes it different from Confluence’s own copy

Comments come across — footer and inline — with “Originally by …” written in.
Blog posts come across, with their attachments.
Links are rewritten to point at the copies instead of the original, both links by page id and links by title.
Links to pages that weren’t copied are listed by name — the page the link is on, and the page it points at (or that page’s id, when Space Factory couldn’t read its title) — so you know what will be broken before you find out by clicking. Links by title and links by address both count.
The page order is put back. Confluence’s copy doesn’t always keep it.
The space description and labels come across.
The copy can be undone, like anything else Space Factory makes.

The original space is never touched.

Big spaces

The report says how long the copy will take. It works out at about a minute, plus a second and a half for each page and five seconds for each blog post, so a 2,000-page space takes about 50 minutes. You can close the page; the copy carries on without you.

Space Factory keeps to the share of Atlassian’s hourly allowance your admin sets in Settings — 8,000 points an hour unless they change it. When a copy uses that up, it waits and carries on by itself in the next hour. Nothing is lost, and the screen says when it will resume. With the default share, a 2,000-page copy runs into a second hour. If Atlassian itself asks the app to slow down, it waits as long as Atlassian says.

The most a copy takes in one go is 5,000 pages. A bigger space is refused; make a template of it instead and add it a section at a time.