Are Jira Projects/Spaces deleted after some time of not being used?

[Roman Smitskyi]

Hello fellow colleagues, 

In 2023, it was my first time to use Jira Cloud with a free plan, and I have created a project which I called "Sandbox". I tried it out, created some draft stories there and happily forgot about it.

Today, I opened Jira Cloud once again, it was empty. I created a new project for my needs, started creating issues there, and at some point I remembered that there was this project which I have created before 2 years ago, and I can't find it anymore.

Was it deleted? If it was, is there any way to retrieve it? 

And what is the most important, is my current project which I created today under the danger of being deleted at some point as well?

Thanks for your time to anyone who will answer :)

[Trudy Claspill · Accepted solution]

Hello @Roman Smitskyi 

Short answers:

Was it deleted? Probably yes. 

If it was, is there any way to retrieve it? Depends on when it was deleted.

And what is the most important, is my current project which I created today under the danger of being deleted at some point as well? Not as long as you make sure to login to Jira at least once every 119 days.

Longer answer:

When you sign up for a Free subscription to Jira, if you have 120 consecutive days with no activity (no logins to Jira) then the subscription will be deactivated. There will be a short time period (15 days if the Free Jira subscription is your only product subscription) during which you have a chance to reactivate the subscription. After that the data is permanently deleted and can't be recovered.

Emails will be sent to the Organization Administrator and Site Administrator for the product as the inactivity period grows. warning that the subscription will be deactivated due to inactivity.

An email will be sent when the subscription is deactivated also.

So, if your original subscription was left inactive it was likely deactivated. If those 120 days of inactivity happened more than 15-60 days ago, then the data is permanently deleted by now.

And your current/new Jira Free subscription will not get deleted (by Atlassian) as long as you login into it regularly and don't leave it totally inactive for 120 consecutive days. Atlassian does not monitor activity for individual projects/spaces within your Jira instance and won't delete those individually due to inactivity.

Reference: What is the free Jira Cloud Plan? 

[Roman Smitskyi]

Much obliged for your answer, you've been a great help! 

[John Funk]

Hi Roman,

No, issues nor projects are deleted automatically based on time or lack of use for individual items. But you can lose your instance if you don't log in for a long period. When was the last time you logged into the instance - 2023? If that is the case, then yes, Atlassian will close your Jira instance from lack of use. That is probably what happened.