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How can I recover my old repositories ?

How can I recover my old repositories ?

Hi,

After a long hiatus I've logged back in to find all my repositories and workspace gone.

Reading on the forums I learn about deletions earlier this year.

I have not received any email regarding these changes.
Can you please help me temporarily restore my workspace so I can make a local backup ?

Please and thank you,
George

2 answers

2 votes

Hi @orgicus welcome to the Community

This may be related to Bitbucket’s cleanup of inactive Free workspaces, but a missing workspace is not necessarily permanently deleted yet.

https://community.atlassian.com/forums/Bitbucket-articles/Bitbucket-cleanup-of-free-unused-workspaces-what-you-need-to/ba-p/3144063

Please check the following page while signed in to the Atlassian account that originally administered the workspace:

https://bitbucket.org/account/workspaces/deactivated

If they not listed there please contact https://www.atlassian.com/company/contact/purchasing-licensing#/ But we as community members cannot promise anything here.

Best,

Arek 🤠

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Hi Arek,

Thank you for the swift reply.

Unfortunately I can't see any workspaces to restore following the /account/workspaces/deactivated route.

What is strange is that I briefly saw a nofitication at the top mentioning I'm using more than 1GB (I do remember having a few larger repos):
2026-07-24 09_06_27-WhatsApp Image 2025-08-01 at 11.48.29 (1).jpeg.png

I don't currently see that. Perhaps there's a bug preventing me from seeing and restoring my old workspace (orgicus) and repos ?

Can you please help me restore them even briefly so I can back them up locally ?

Thank you so much,
George

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Like • Arkadiusz Wroblewski likes this

I flagged this post to get attention from somebody from the Atlassian Team.

That will need backend checks.

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1 vote

Hi @orgicus

I could see that your old workspace had not been accessed since 2023, and was therefore targeted by the free workspace cleanup.

The login email associated with that workspace, is not the one you've used to raise this community post - which is why you wouldn't have received an email and also why it wouldn't have been visible in your list of de-activated workspaces (hint: the domain is the name of a company).

The good news is that I've since re-activated that workspace and can see that all the repositories are still intact, so there's no permanent data loss here.

To access that workspace though, you'll need to login using the correct email address - if you're unsure of what that email is, you can check your git config on a local repo belonging to that workspace to reveal any email addresses you may have previously used:

git config --list

I hope this helps.

Regards,

- Ben (Bitbucket Cloud Support)

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Hi @Ben

The fact the repos are not lost is amazing news!

Unfortunately I'm travelling and don't have access to the machine with a local copy a repo to run `git config --list` at the moment.

Regarding the name of a company, is that `[REDACTED]` ?

Just to double check, does the workspace you found contain repository names such as `[REDACTED]` or `[REDACTED]` ? (there might be a few more, but these two I'm keen on retrieving).

Do the forums support private messaging (in case there are privacy concerns) ?

Thank you so much!

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Hi @orgicus

Yep, thats the correct company name, and yes I can see both of those repositories you listed (there are 17 in total).

Unfortunately, there's no private messaging available on the community forum which is why I was intentionally vague and did not reveal any sensitive information in my response.

I've redacted the information you provided just in case.

Cheers!

- Ben (Bitbucket Cloud Support)

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Hi @Ben

That is brilliant! Thank you so much for your effort tracking this info down.

The challenge I have is that the company I used to for up to 2023 is unfortunately no longer active and that means I can no longer log in with the company email (my first name @ company name .com ). I believe that was before 2FA was enforced so I'm really worried I'm out of options signing in with that account.

What can I do in this situation ? Would it be possible switch the email used either my username at gmail.com or firstname.lastname at gmail.com ?

Thank you so much,
George

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