Archiving a project in Jira Server
Platform notice: Server and Data Center only. This article only applies to Atlassian products on the Server and Data Center platforms.
Support for Server* products ended on February 15th 2024. If you are running a Server product, you can visit the Atlassian Server end of support announcement to review your migration options.
*Except Fisheye and Crucible
- This knowledge base article was created prior to the JIRA Software Data Center 7.10 release that introduced a project archiving feature. More details on this Data Center Specific feature that can be found in Jira Software 7.10 release notes
- As of today JIRA Server does not yet have this feature natively, however there is an existing feature request for this in JRASERVER-67413 - Getting issue details... STATUS
- This KB can still be useful for JIRA Server, Data Center, or Cloud versions, please just understand that the term archiving can have a slightly different meaning between the native feature and the steps in this KB
It is sometimes necessary to archive an old project, while retaining the project's data for future auditing purposes. There are a number of ways to achieve this:
Online archiving
Archiving a project online means keeping all of the project's issue data in your live Jira instance. The advantage of archiving a project online is that you can easily make the project accessible again if required.
There are two ways to archive a project online:
'Hiding' a project
A 'hidden' project will still be visible via the 'Administration' menu, but it will no longer appear in the 'Browse Projects' list, and no-one will be able to search, view or modify any of the project's issues.
- Create a new permission scheme. Leave all of the permissions empty.
- Associate the new permission scheme with the project that you wish to hide (see Assigning a Permission Scheme to a Project ).
Making a project 'Read-Only'
If you make a project read-only, the project will be visible via the 'Administration' menu, and will appear in the 'Browse Projects' list. The project's issues will be searchable and viewable, but no one will be able to modify them.
- Create a new permission scheme. Grant the 'Browse Project' permission to everyone who needs to be able to search or browse the project, or view its issues. Leave all of the other permissions empty.
- Associate the new permission scheme with the project that you wish to hide (see Assigning a Permission Scheme to a Project ).
- To prevent workflow transitions from happening you will need to update the workflow and add a condition to each transition. The conditions should check that a user has the Edit Issues permission.
Accessing an archived online project
If you archived a project online, by hiding it or making it read-only, then all of the project's data can be made accessible very easily. Simply associate the project with a permission scheme where the appropriate permissions (e.g. 'Edit Issue', 'Assign Issue', 'Resolve Issue', etc) are assigned to the appropriate people.
Offline archiving
Archiving a project offline means creating an XML backup, then deleting the project and all of its issue data from your live Jira instance. The project will no longer be available via the 'Administration' menu or the 'Browse Projects' list, and its issues will no longer exist in your live Jira system.
The disadvantage of offline archiving is that there is no easy way to restore a deleted project to your live Jira instance.
If there is a possibility that you will need to restore the project into your live Jira instance at some point in the future, then online archiving is recommended. Offline archiving should only be done if you are certain you will never need to restore this project to a live Jira instance (i.e. you will only ever restore the data to a non-production instance).
Archiving a project offline
- Create a global XML backup of your entire live Jira instance.
- Import the XML backup into a test Jira instance. Make sure that the test Jira instance uses a separate database from your live Jira instance, as the import will overwrite all data in the database.
- In your test Jira instance, verify that you can view the issues of the project that you are archiving.
- In your live Jira instance, select Projects from the Administration menu, then click the Delete link to delete the project and all of its issues.
Please note that deleting the Project will result in all the attachments also getting deleted from the Jira Home Directory. Please ensure that the attachments are copied to the test instance before deleting the project.
Accessing an archived offline project
- Import the XML backup into a test Jira instance. Make sure that the test Jira instance uses a separate database from your live Jira instance, as the import will overwrite all data in the database.
Restoring a deleted project
If you wish to restore a project from a backup file, please refer to the instructions in the Restoring a project from backup documentation. Note that the Jira version and database type must be consistent with when the archive was created.
Archiving a project using Project Configurator
Another option to archive projects is by using Project Configurator for Jira add-on, it will allow you to specify whether to export and import only specific project configurations or complete projects, unlike the Offline archiving method where there is no easy way to restore a deleted project to your live Jira instance.
For more details check Exporting projects from the source instance page.
Archiving issues
Archiving issues is also possible. The basic method would be to filter for issues that you want to archive and then bulk move them into a separate project which can then be archived by using one of the methods above.