Share your archiving successes and frustrations

[Kamil Kolonko]

Hi team, my name is Kamil and I'm working as an Engineering Manager in one of DC cross-product teams.

We’re currently exploring the role archiving plays in managing your data in Jira, Confluence, and Bitbucket Data Center, and would love to hear about your successes and frustrations with archiving in Jira!

Not sure where to start? Perhaps think about these questions:

• Do the current Data Center archiving features meet your expectations?

• What prevents you (or your team members) from archiving spaces, projects, or issues?

• What would you like to see as the next improvement in archiving?

• Do you use workarounds or other ways of marking your content as archived?

[Daniel Ebers]

Hi @Kamil Kolonko 

thanks for bringing up this topic - we just had a chat on this with the team last week, so your questions are very welcome.
Currently we are using Jira Server and have no kind of archiving concept in place.

The features of Data Center sound good - but users tell yet they would demand a different approach, let me explain what I understood so far.

• It should not be possible to change/alter projects (including all their issues) after they are archived. This seems to originate from some regulatory concerns (best described with digital preservation requirements, roughly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_preservation). Requirements like this often arise in the context of tax law but also audits (mainly public accountants)
• It should be possible to archive projects (including all their issues) in a legal compliant way
  • example: stored outside of Jira (however when considering an outside Jira-solution it would be accepted to have it get less features like Jira actually provide - but search/browse/link would probably be required in order to work with the archive)
    • write-only, data must not be changed after it is on the "external storage"
    • I believe what they are saying is that currently a permission scheme can be reverted quite easy to grant write access (knowing that this will be logged in Audit Log) - the barriers to alter data in the described write-only storage should be much higher, if alteration should be technically possible there at all

Concerns when switching license to Data Center:

• currently customers can "retire" a whole Jira Server instance - licenses are perpetual and a license would just not be renewed (Permission Schemes would be switched to browse only for all roles/groups) - however, using Data Center it would be needed to keep the annual subscription in order to access projects/issues at all.
  We seem to have understood, there is no option to keep an instance for some months/few years in a "archiving" mode - (this mode could mean read-only availability of projects/issues)

Input which is not directly related to an archive:

• in projects which are still live without any impact to the performance it should be possible to put as many issues in it as the business requires - for a licecycle of 10 years
  • to be understood in a way that archiving would not be a thing in some cases when the "live system" is capable of handling the amount of data

Regards,
Daniel