Entire Confluence instance suddenly deleted without notice

[Stefan X]

My entire Confluence instance at freehome.atlassian.net appears to have been deleted from one day to the next and can no longer be found.

I did not receive any email, warning, or other notification beforehand. I understand that this was a free account, but I still find it unacceptable that an entire instance, including all stored data, can apparently be removed without any prior notice.

Unfortunately, some of the pages contained important information that is now lost. I should have known better and kept a separate backup of all cloud-hosted content.

Has anyone experienced something similar, and is there any possibility of recovering the instance or the deleted data?

[Nikola Perisic]

Hello @Stefan X 

Atlassian automatically deletes all instances that are on free tier that haven't been used for 120 days. In order to get your sites back, I've requested an assistance from an Atlassian support engineer. They will get in touch in next 2-3 business days.

[Stefan X]

Thank you for taking the time to look into this and for explaining what happened.

I have to admit that the outcome is still very disappointing. The last activity on the site that I can clearly document took place on April 4. I had shared the private space with my company account, so I received daily update notifications whenever changes were made, and I still have an email confirming this activity.

I also could not find any emails regarding a planned deactivation. Of course, it is possible that they may have been filtered into spam, although I checked there as well and could not find any relevant messages from the past 30 days.

I understand that the data can no longer be restored, so I will take this as an important reminder to maintain separate backups of all cloud-hosted content. I will also make sure to export our work-related content as soon as possible.

In the past, self-hosted systems felt comparatively fast and straightforward. Since moving to cloud-based solutions, my experience has unfortunately been less positive, particularly in terms of performance and control over the data. With the growing use of AI and automation, I may need to look into creating a more independent solution in the future.

Thank you again for your clarification and support.

[Jessica]

Hello @Stefan X 

We're sorry to hear your Confluence product and site were deleted.

Checking the records for freehome.atlassian.net, it seems the site got deleted after the product was inactive for some time.

We also found there were some emails sent to your account prior to the deactivation, since May, about the inactivity there and that it would be deactivated between 31 May - 1st June, if there was no activity on the Confluence product.

For reference, these are the current timelines, well explained by our community champion Trudy here for free plans: Atlassian Jira/JSM/Confluence Free Tier Inactivity & Data Deletion Timeline 

Unfortunately, since it was suspended back on June 1st and the site was deleted for some time now, we are unable to help restoring any data, even on a best effort, as we have a really small window to try restoring data in these cases, and even then, it is not guaranteed it will work, due to the complexity of this process.

We highly recommend taking backups of your data (all products), since restores are not supported, and we can't rollback changes in general: Can Atlassian’s RDS backups be used to roll back changes? 

We hope this helps clarifying what happened, and once again, we are sorry about the deleted site.

Regards,
Jessica

[Stefan X]

hey, @Jessica 

Thank you for taking the time to look into this and for explaining what happened.

I have to admit that the outcome is still very disappointing. The last activity on the site that I can clearly document took place on April 4. I had shared the private space with my company account, so I received daily update notifications whenever changes were made, and I still have an email confirming this activity.

I also could not find any emails regarding a planned deactivation. Of course, it is possible that they may have been filtered into spam, although I checked there as well and could not find any relevant messages from the past 30 days.

I understand that the data can no longer be restored, so I will take this as an important reminder to maintain separate backups of all cloud-hosted content. I will also make sure to export our work-related content as soon as possible.

In the past, self-hosted systems felt comparatively fast and straightforward. Since moving to cloud-based solutions, my experience has unfortunately been less positive, particularly in terms of performance and control over the data. With the growing use of AI and automation, I may need to look into creating a more independent solution in the future.

Thank you again for your clarification and support.