A rogue former employee has just deleted everything on bitbucket, what should we do?

[David Elliot Johnson]

A former employee has just deleted everything in our bitbucket account - all repos, everything. What should we do? Is there any way it can be recovered? 

[Peter Van de Voorde]

Hey David,

Welcome to the Atlassian Community, that sounds like something terrible! 

If it's Bitbucket Cloud you could reach out to Atlassian Support to see if they can help recover your code: https://support.atlassian.com 

Otherwise I would hope that your developers have local copies of your bitbucket repositories and you can recover your repositories from their local instances.

Cheers,
Peter

[Theodora Boudale]

Hi @David Elliot Johnson,

If you are using Bitbucket Server (self-hosted instance), then the way to recover would be from any backups or from the clone that other developers may have on their machine.

If you are using Bitbucket Cloud (repos hosted in https://bitbucket.org/):

I cannot see a Bitbucket Cloud account in our system with the email of your community account. If your question concerns Bitbucket Cloud and you are using an account with a different email, we may be able to help restore the core repository content only, as long as the deletion happened within the last 7 days. We are unable to recover metadata or any content that was deleted past 7 days.

I would suggest to first check with any other employees who may have a clone of the repos locally and see if you can restore the repos from these clones.

If this is not possible, and the deletion happened within the last 7 days, and you are on the Free plan and can't create a support ticket yourself as Peter suggested, then please log in to community with the email of your Bitbucket Cloud account that had access to these repos, and leave a comment here.

I can then create a support ticket for you so that we check if we can restore these repositories from our backup.

Kind regards,
Theodora