Archiving an issue
By archiving an issue, you can hide it from Jira, and preserve the data it contains in case you need it later. It’s good practice to archive done or resolved issues, or those whose resolution due date has passed, so that they don’t clutter your Jira instance. For example, many customers archive issues that haven't been updated for the last 2 years.
You can archive one or multiple issues. Note that archiving large numbers of issues may take a while. No reindexing is needed when you archive or restore issues.
This feature is available for Data Center only.
Before you begin
- By default, you must be a Jira Administrator or Jira System Administrator to archive or restore issues. However, an administrator might also give you the Archive Issues for a Project and the Restore Issues for a Project permissions to archive and restore issues in a specific project. By default, these permissions are not enabled.
- You don't have to prepare issues in any way before archiving them. You can archive any issue, and restore it later, if needed.
Archiving an issue
To archive an issue:
- Go to Issues or open your board or backlog.
Find the issue you want to archive, open it and select and select More > Archive.
The issue will be immediately hidden from view and moved to the archive. Each issue will be archived with all its subtasks.
Archiving multiple issues as part of bulk change
If you want to archive thousands of issues at once, instead of selecting the issues manually, you can make a bulk change. By default, this option allows you to archive all the issues on the current page or a maximum of 1000 issues. However, a system admin can raise this limit if needed.
You either need to be a Jira admin or a delegated admin to make a bulk change.
Open Issues.
- Select the issues you want to view.
Open the
drop-down and select the number of issues you want to perform the change on. You can perform the change on the current page or a maximum of 1000 issues. You might not have these options if you only have a few issues. Then you can only select to perform the operation on the issues you have. You can also right-click one or several issues on your board or backlog and select Bulk change.
- Select the issues and click Next.
- Select Archive issues.
- Select whether to send a notification about the change to the users involved in the issues.
The issues will be archived with all their subtasks. Note that issues might have multiple subtasks so archiving might take a while because of a great number of subtasks.
Archived issues disappear from the dashboard and search. For more information, see What happens to my issues.
What happens to an issue after you archive it?
Here's a few things you should know about:
Restoring an issue
All the issue data remains in the database, so you can restore it whenever it's needed again. Currently, you can restore one issue at a time if you know its direct link. If you do not have the direct link, ask your administrator to export the issues as the export file contains the issue URLs.
To restore an archived issue, open it with the direct link and click the Restore button.
The issue will be restored to its original state, and brought back to Jira. While issues are being restored Jira is also reindexed so that no additional action is needed for the issues to be visible and searchable again. The issue will be restored with all its subtasks.
Having the direct link allows you to restore the issues that have been archived individually. If an issue has been archived together with the project it belonged to, you need to restore the project to restore the issue. For restoring projects, see Archiving a project.
Exporting archived issues
You need to be a Jira admin or system admin to export archived issues to a CSV file for audit purposes.
Archiving FAQ
Q: I want to restore subtasks but not an issue. Is this possible?
A: No. If you want to restore subtasks you also need to restore the issue these subtasks belong to.
Q: I want to delete a project that has some archived issues in it. What happens to these issues?
A: The issues get deleted and are no longer stored as archived issues.
Q: Is the information about archived issues included in batch notifications?
A: Yes. We inform you about every issue archived and restored.