Bitbucket cleanup of free unused workspaces: what you need to know

[#1]

Hello Bitbucket Community. 

At Atlassian, we’re committed to delivering a secure, high-performing Bitbucket Cloud experience for all our customers. As part of our ongoing platform improvements, we’re taking steps to clean up unused or empty free workspaces.

Why are we doing this?
Removing unused free workspaces helps us:

• Unblock critical Atlassian platform migrations and improvements

• Ensure a smoother experience for active users

• Adopt Atlassian platform and its security and compliance features

What’s changing?
Starting November 2025, we’ll notify administrators of empty or unused free workspaces.

• If your workspace doesn’t contain any repositories

  • it will be deactivated and scheduled for deletion on December 9, 2025. No action is needed.

• If your workspace contains repositories but hasn’t been logged in over 6 months, or content hasn’t been accessed or updated in over 6 months

  • You must login and update your content before January 15, 2026 to keep your workspace.

What will happen after January 15, 2026?

• Your workspace will be deactivated.

• You can recover it until May 15, 2026

• If not accessed or recovered by May 15, 2026, the workspace and its content will be permanently deleted.

Note: Atlassian will attempt to notify all impacted users via email. If your information is not up to date or you have unsubscribed from Atlassian emails, you may not receive these notifications.

What if I need a workspace later?

You can create a new Bitbucket workspace anytime at admin.atlassian.com and follow the steps outline in Add a new Atlassian app or collection to your organization | Atlassian Support.

Your Bitbucket user profile, other active workspaces, and all your other Atlassian apps are not affected by this cleanup.

What about workspaces with content or recent activity?
Workspaces with recent logins or repository updates are not affected.

Our commitment
We’re making these changes to keep Bitbucket Cloud fast, reliable, and ready for what’s next.

Thank you for being part of our community and helping us build a better platform for everyone.

[ssokolow]

Is this a one-time thing or should I just migrate everything to GitHub to avoid the annoying whac-a-mole factor?

(I created a BitBucket account back before GitHub offered free private repos for personal projects I wasn't yet ready to share and I've been subscribed to that feature request for a proper GitHub Pages equivalent for something like a decade now.)

[Antony Hutchison]

Fair enough. For security, I presume you will prevent reusing the names of the deleted workspaces to block malicious reuse. Can you confirm what your policy will be regarding re-registration of names that were previously used?

[elliottslaughter]

The article should be updated to explicitly state whether this is a one-time or recurring change.

[elliottslaughter]

Also it would be best to explicitly clarify whether git operations (clone/push/pull) are sufficient to mark a workspace as "active" for this purpose.

[ssokolow]

...also, could you please explicitly donate any and all deleted public repos to the Internet Archive?

As a retro-hobbyist with an interest in programming for old systems, it's frustrating how many things are apparently lost to time due to things like "Source code not included but feel free to shoot me an e-mail if you want it."

(I understand your apparent "We can't afford to run an equivalent to the Google Code Archive" position.)

EDIT: Or, if you don't plan to, please inform us A.S.A.P. so someone can get https://wiki.archiveteam.org/ on the case.

[Nicholas Cookson]

This sounds risky, your guidance is not clear enough for me.

[Andry Banyk]

Is it correct that the easiest solution is to wait until January 16, when recovery will be available through your UI (e.g., via a button on a repo page)? If I use this option on January 16, are there any negative implications for my repositories?

[impiaaa]

How do I know if a workspace or repository is "inactive?" Where is the button marked "Reactivate workspace" as mentioned in the email? If this button doesn't exist, how do I mark a workspace or repository as "active?"

[Ulrich Kuhnhardt _IzymesCo_]

I have received an email listing a-free-workspace we use for testing, mentioning that it could be deleted. Obviously there is a LOT of activity in "a-free-workspace". On the other hand we have other free workspace that are a lot quieter that would match the criteria for deletion and they are NOT mentioned in the email.

Q1: Clarify content update or content access

Could @Yana or Atlassian Bitbucket Team please also clarify

  >> 

• If your workspace contains repositories but hasn’t been logged in over 6 months, or content hasn’t been accessed or updated in over 6 months

  • You must login and update your content before January 15, 2026 to keep your workspace.

Is it content accessed or content updated?

Q2: Personal Bitbucket Account Workspace 

Every user in Bitbucket has a personal workspace that comes with their Bitbucket account. For example my personal workspace is "ulrich_izymes". I do not use it enough and it would be deleted.

@Yana can you please clarify what the effect will be if these (unused) personal Bitbucket account workspaces get deleted?

Q3: Deletion process

@Yana can you please elaborate on the deletion process. Do workspace owners get a deletion warning email similar to what org admins get for Confluence and Jira inactive organizations?

[lbettini]

What about standard repositories (i.e., outside workspaces)?
Actually, I never used workspaces at all...

[dovholuk]

so make a public repo, push a change on a cron? or just move to github as  ssokolow says for safety. thanks bitbucket... :/

[Ulrich Kuhnhardt _IzymesCo_]

@lbettini what is your 'standard repository' url? I thing every repo must be in a workspace, even if it is your personal bitbucket account workspace.

[Charles Robertson]

What do we have to do to keep a workspace active. I have spent a decade building up my BitBucket Repo. 

I would definitely like to keep everything, but often none of my repos get updated for many months.  

Please give us more information on how to keep our repos active?

I have added a workspace variable and will just keep adding dummy variables every now and again. I hope this is enough to keep my workspace active? Seems a little ridiculous but hey go, I guess if it preserves my workspace, so be it. 

[Ovidiu Gabriel]

@Yana This is confusing, what do you understand by workspace visit and workspace usage? Please define.

[Diti]

This, along with the new forced ToS updates upon logging on (“either accept to let the public feed on your data and then you may proceed to see your repos, or don’t accept and kiss your data goodbye”), shows it’s a “growth” and shareholder initiative. Get your data out of here and host it on Codeberg, or, at the very least, GitHub.

[gentijo]

EDIT: Where do we access the restore workspace, I am not seeing any of my workspaces and I am not seeing the "button" anywhere ?

UPDATE: I think I have it. When I generically log into my account, it used to tell me the Workspaces I belong too.  That is no longer the case. 

When I access any of my workspaces directory (bitbucket.org/workspace) I can then see Projects/Repos.  If there was a link to show me my workspaces for my login, this system message may of been much clearer. 

Thankfully the email send a reminder of my workspace names as some i haven't looked at in a while and I would not of been able to guess the name without the email. 

[abdul khaled]

Not entirely clear on your definition of a workspace as its not a term i've seen anywhere in bitbucket, but can you please confirm the following:

1. Logging in to my account Workspace via UI before 15 jan 2026 will preserve all my repositories under that account Workspace
2. Logging in to the account Workspace every 6 months will also preserve all repositories under that account Workspace going forward.
3. Making a commit every 6 months to any repository under that account Workspace will preserve all repositories under that Workspace going forward.
4. Will there be a heads up email before a workspace is under risk of deletion, and how much ahead of time will we be notified?
5. For workspaces with 6 months inactivity, will they also be deactivated first, then permanently deleted 1-2 months after? or is this only for deactivations on the 15th of jan?
6. What actions explicitly count as a way to activate, other than login, commit, do pipeline actions/webhooks/Pulls etc count?
7. Is it safe to assume these actions are not limited to only the admin of the workspace
8. @ssokolow love the idea of the archive, but it would suck to no longer have control over retracting a repo for small time developer with say private key leaks in their git history or something harder to reverse. As long as users have the ability to toggle that permission on/off

Edit: updated above questions to refer to workspaces instead of account

[gentijo]

@abdul khaled  Your workspace is what came after bitbucket.org. i.e. bitbucket.org/projectxyz.  Workspaces are more like orgs, I have about 6 workspaces, one for each failed startup :). Then under that workspace I can see project/repos.

If you have multiple workspaces, I think they are saying you need to visit each one and just logging into your account is not enough. 

If you didn't create a workspace when you started, it may be something like default. 

[gentijo]

Is there a way to download all projects from a workspace as a backup, i.e. a zip file for each repo in the projects which is then zipped into one big file ?

[squdle]

{Removed: No longer bitbucket user after this policy change}

[ssokolow]

I should also point out that even SourceForge (i.e. the oldest project hosting service I'm personally aware of, which was still requiring manual approval for new projects when I joined in the early 2000s) is still hosting old public projects de facto in perpetuity as a de facto public service, let alone the younger Google Code Archive when Google is famous for killing projects, so the lack of a clear "Don't worry. We have X, Y, and Z in place to ensure abandoned public repos don't vanish into the ether forever" is very bad PR for BitBucket.

[MaTachi]

I cannot find any button "Reactivate workspace".

[Ovidiu Gabriel]

@MaTachi  This is poor communication from Atlassian. My understanding is that "Reactivate workspace" button will appear after 15th of January 2026 and only after the workspace is already marked for deletion. Deletion will take place on May 15.

@Yana I visited each workspace list of repositories and added a new dummy environment variable to each workspace. From the official communication it was not clear if a push to git repositories is needed to mark the workspace as active.

[Issac Osis]

doesn't tell you anything or give you any idea what atlassian account is actually associated with it or even if you have a bitbucket at all on an account wasting your time checking.

[Juan Acosta]

I cannot find the reactive option in any place on the General Workspace settings for the specific workspace that is supposed to be unused. Why don't you add an easy screen to verify that and reactivate all the pending workspaces? Again, Atlasian is breaking things that are working, even for paying users.