What are the impacts to scheme/field/issue type housekeeping with Archived Projects or Issues?

[Tanya L Christensen]

Within the instances I manage there are several projects that have issues dating back for years.  The projects themselves can't be archived but I'd like to provide guidance to the project admins to consider archiving some of their issues per Archiving an issue

These older projects also have some niche fields and issues types which we would like to plan to remove or add to our deprecate list.

If I'm searching for field or issue type used in the live/cached instance I could be lead to believe a field is low or not used and decide to remove it (reassigning issues to a new field or issue type during the process).  What happens to the archived issues that may be using the field or issue type?  If some decided to un-archive the issue I can predict there will be errors.  But, maybe Atlassian was proactive and has built in a migration process to the un-archive.  If anyone has tested this or has any input I'd love to hear from you.

Thanks - Tanya

[JimmyVanAU · Accepted solution]

Hi Tanya,

With archiving issues, there's no impact as the project is still intact, and may well still be in use.

As for the schemes, they also remain attached, so you can't delete or modify them.

See https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjiraserver/archiving-a-project-938847621.html, and the line:

What happens to a project after you archive it?

Here's a few things you should know about:

Configuration >

• Archiving a project won't affect the configuration it uses (schemes, screens, workflows, etc.) The configuration remains active and is still shared with other projects. If you change it, the changes will also apply to an archived project once it's restored.

If you did try to remove an issue type only used in archived projects, you won't be able to do so. The issue type is still associated with an issue type scheme, and if this issue type scheme is associated with an archived project, Jira will prevent you from creating a corrupt state. 

If I'm searching for field or issue type used in the live/cached instance I could be lead to believe a field is low or not used and decide to remove it (reassigning issues to a new field or issue type during the process).  What happens to the archived issues that may be using the field or issue type?

I haven't come across the custom field situation myself, but my recommendation is to do the cleanup before you archive. Archiving will not allow you to search for issues, so it's very hard to determine the use of a configuration after the fact (other than querying the database). Of course, test everything in a non-production environment.

Hope that helps!

[Tanya C]

Thanks for the info @JimmyVanAU

I wish I had a non-procduction environment.  We're working on it so this situation may be yet another justification.  :) 

[JimmyVanAU]

I'm amused by the fact that you're running data center without a non-production environment 😅 (or is this what the cessation of server licenses has done, force small customers onto DC).

In your case, I'd test on small projects/schemes first. Good luck!