Archiving a Project

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.

1. Create a new permission scheme. Leave all of the permissions empty.
2. 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 noone will be able to modify them.

1. 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.
2. Associate the new permission scheme with the project that you wish to hide (see Assigning a Permission Scheme to a Project ).
   
   
3. 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.

Archiving a project offline

1. Create a global XML backup of your entire live JIRA instance.
2. 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.
3. In your test JIRA instance, verify that you can view the issues of the project that you are archiving.
4. 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.

Accessing an archived offline project

1. 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.