Currently the JIRA Backup/Restore process only works on a JIRA installation as a whole. As one of JIRA strengths is it's ability to be integrated with other systems and or extended, the current backup scheme is troublesome when one wants to say, add new features to a 'production' JIRA as part of a development process.

For example, a new release of a JIRA-based system involves the addition of a few custom fields. Currently there's no automated way to develop/test those changes in a development copy then only apply the tested config changes to the production instance. At the very least the ability to backup/restore config changes separately from issues would be a nice start. Selectively adding these changes manually is tedious at best.