I happened to have an issue whose description contained XML code, a it was explaining an XML related issue. I exported the JIRA database to XML, and when editing it, my XML editor advised me it was not well formed. I figured out the problem was because it was interpreting description content like CDATA tags as real XML content. You'll notice how HTML codes are escaped (like &reg etc.) so as not to confuse HTML parsers. The same should have been done for XML-like text before dumping to XML output. If I hadn't noticed this, I probably would have gotten an error importing my XML backup into JIRA. I was able to fix this by editing the data in my XML file, but I was just lucky my editor flagged this and I was able to catch this before trying to upload. JIRA should be able to encode and decode XML-like content. I can't expect users won't enter XML code into their issue description. In fact.. I could do it right here which would render your XML backups problematic too .. but I won't