Are Bitbucket Repositories and accounts deactivated and removed after some time?

Hunter Lybbert

I used a school .edu email to make an account for bitbucket repo's when I was in school a few years ago. After recently losing the files from these projects locally, I tried to return to Bitbucket to clone the git repositories locally again, only to find I can't get into that same account again. It appears like I have never had an account. These repositories would have last been accessed in April 2022.

Does Bitbucket deactivate and remove these after some time of inactivity, like 3 years for example?

Theodora Boudale

Hi Hunter and welcome to the community.

There was one time Atlassian removed Bitbucket accounts, in 2023, and it only concerned accounts that were not migrated to Atlassian accounts (https://id.atlassian.com/) due to missing or invalid/malformed/unconfirmed primary email:

• https://community.atlassian.com/forums/Bitbucket-articles/Deactivation-of-user-accounts-that-lack-an-Atlassian-account/ba-p/2169213

For context, we began migrating Bitbucket Cloud accounts to Atlassian accounts in 2016, and any Bitbucket Cloud account created after 2017 is automatically linked to an Atlassian account. Accounts with a valid confirmed primary email address were not removed, but some of them were deactivated if the user never logged in https://bitbucket.org/ from 2016 until 2018 when we were doing the migration. These users see a message "We couldn’t log you in" now after logging in with their Atlassian account, and we can reactivate them.

 

Other than this very specific one-time case, we do not deactivate or delete accounts due to inactivity.

 

Atlassian (and Bitbucket) accounts can also be deleted by organizations admins, but only if they are managed accounts:

• https://support.atlassian.com/user-management/docs/what-are-managed-accounts/

Companies and universities have the option verify their domain with Atlassian, and if they do, all accounts with an email address from this domain are managed by the respective company / university. The admins can then delete or deactivate these managed accounts.

 

I don't know when exactly your account was created, whether it had a valid confirmed primary email address, and, in case it was created before 2016, whether you migrated it to an Atlassian account.

It could have been deleted in 2023 when we removed accounts, it could have been deleted by an Org Admin at the university, but it is also possible the account had a different email address as primary. Login is only possible with the primary email address, not with email aliases that are added to an account here https://bitbucket.org/account/settings/email/ to track commits.

If you believe that your account didn't meet the criteria for the deletions we made in 2023 and that it wasn't deleted by an Org admin at your university, I would suggest try logging in https://bitbucket.org/ with other email addresses you own, and see if any of them logs you into the correct account (I often see users who think that the primary email address of their Bitbucket account is X, but X is an email alias to their account and the primary one is a different email they own). If you get asked to create a Bitbucket username after you log in with a certain email address, this means that there is no Bitbucket Cloud account with that email as primary, so you can skip the email from the process.

Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions.

Kind regards,
Theodora