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Projects and data getting deleted automatically

Ander Baher Project Ops

Hello,

I have a free Jira account and my projects and data keeps getting deleted. Only I have access to the admin account. I restored the projects, but they are marked for deletion.

This is a very old active free account. Does JIRA do this automation where it marks projects for deletion automatically esp those for Free account, if not, how can I explain this effect? I had a JIRA API key that I have revoked also. But still the deletion continues to happen.

Accepted answers

Ander Baher Project Ops

Hello

We found the issue out and it was a big miss from our side. An old jira API token which was not actively used by us was mistakenly exposed publically on GitHub in a research project that we collaborated with some university.

Atlassian sent us an email (which went into spam) and jira marked our projects and all the data under them as a spam account (being under free subscription) and marked it for deletion.

For two days an automatic deletion job, ensuring Jira compliance, deleted the projects whenever we recovered them from Trash. It seems that finally now the deletion job has halted and it's no longer deleting pur projects and issues. We have also asked the college to remove the key from the public GitHub repo.

Really an embarassing lesson for us!!

Thank you for your help and support.

All comments

Tinker Fadoua

@Ander Baher Project Ops

It is an odd behavior. Unless I delete my projects they remain in my instance.

Are you being active on your instance?
Do you ever get emails from Atlassian that due to inactivity some old projects will be deleted?
Anyone else beside you uses the instance?

With little bit elaboration we can help you.

Best,

Fadoua

Prachi Bolar

Hello,

Welcome to the community

Your site and the jira product is active so that means the projects should be accessible.

This is indeed a different behaviour, until anyone manually deletes a project, the project deletion will. not take place.

If the project was already in trash for more than 60 days then its gets auto deleted

Your site audit log shows as well who initiated the deletion https://xxxx.atlassian.net/auditing/view

Could you please provide a screenshot or something that shows this behaviour

Thank You,

prachi

Trudy P Claspill

@Prachi Bolar

The Audit Log is not available for Free plans, which the author indicates they are using.

Screenshot 2025-07-14 at 9.48.53 AM.png

Prachi Bolar

Oh yes you are right, free plan wont show the audit, we further need the author to provide more details to questions asked here

Ander Baher Project Ops

Hello

Atlassian sent us an email (which went into spam) and jira marked our projects and all the data under them as a spam account (being under free subscription) and marked it for deletion.

Really an embarassing lesson for us!!

Thank you for your help and support.

Ander Baher Project Ops

I have replied in the main thread. Thank you for your help!

Ander Baher Project Ops

thank you for your help! We found the issue out and fixed it. I have described the cause in a reply to the main thread.

Prachi Bolar

Thank you for sharing the root cause ! Indeed an interesting learning and finding here

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