Archiving jira issues

[Vallatharasu Vallatharasu]

We are using jira from 2006. we want to archive issues created till 2009. how I can do this?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

What do you mean by "archive"? The answer is very heavily dependent on that, and is almost certainly going to lead you into rather a complex project that you'll need to plan very carefully.

Think about these specific questions:

1. Is there an easy way to identify everything to archive? (e.g. resolved and last updated < 2009? By some flag on an issue? By project age? )
2. Do you need the archive to be searchable?
3. Why are you archiving?
4. What format do you want the archive in? Jira or is another format acceptable?
5. How are you going to replicate global changes into the archive?
6. How are you going to repeat the process when you want to add more issues to the archive?

The list goes on and on

[Vallatharasu Vallatharasu]

1. Is there an easy way to identify everything to archive? (e.g. resolved and last updated < 2009? By some flag on an issue? By project age? )
yes issues created before 1-Jan-2010

2. Do you need the archive to be searchable?
No

3. Why are you archiving?
we are having more no of issues

4. What format do you want the archive in? Jira or is another format acceptable?
any format, in case if we need to restore, it should be supported

5. How are you going to replicate global changes into the archive?
no idea

6. How are you going to repeat the process when you want to add more issues to the archive?
no idea, looking support for this too

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I think you missed my point - these aren't questions I was asking you to answer here, they are questions you need to ask your users when you start your archiving project. They will determine part of the approach you're going to take. That said...

1. Good, a nice simple rule that you can turn into a filter or search makes it easier

2. This gives you more flexibility in long term storage, but does lead to the question "why can't you just delete them then?"

3. That's not a reason to archive - we all have new issues arriving. The question is aimed more at getting the users to *think* about what they want to archive, why and what they aim to get out of it

4. Restoration is a massive problem - Jira only supports re-importing in one specific format, and that requires that you have the same setup in the target project(s). Which means as soon as you archive, you can no longer make any config changes to the ACTIVE Jira system. So you'll actually need to write your own "restore" functionality

5 and 6 are questions for later in the process - again, you'll need to design and code for them. I mentioned them because you need to ask them at the beginning of the design phase.

[Bob Swift (personal)]

JIRA Command Line Interface can help once you determine what you want to do. For instance,you can use getIssueList to produce a CSV file of all the issues including custom field values. And deleteIssue (JCLI-188) can be scripted easily via runFromSql action.

[Vallatharasu Vallatharasu]

1. Is there an easy way to identify everything to archive? (e.g. resolved and last updated < 2009? By some flag on an issue? By project age? )
yes issues created before 1-Jan-2010

2. Do you need the archive to be searchable?
No

3. Why are you archiving?
we are having more no of issues

4. What format do you want the archive in? Jira or is another format acceptable?
any format, in case if we need to restore, it should be supported

5. How are you going to replicate global changes into the archive?
no idea

6. How are you going to repeat the process when you want to add more issues to the archive?
no idea, looking support for this too

[Greg Carpenter]

My compny would like a simple, built-in "archive" feature as in other applications like Trello.  Archived issues are searchable but they don't show up on boards.  

For instance, if I could archive JIRA issues and include them in queries by including "Archived" in the query, that would suffice. I'm guessing this could be impemented with a custom workflow but it's a such basic, commonly used feature (where available) that it should be built into the product as a global feature.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

>Archived issues are searchable but they don't show up on boards

Create an "archived" status in the workflow and exclude it from the board filter.

The reason it's not "built in" is given above - there's no clear definition of what an archive would be yet.  Atlassian took a stab at it 5-6 years ago and ran into so many complexities and differing requirements from different users, they stopped and moved on to doing data-centre instead.

[TothJ]

There is an issue at Atlassian about this: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-5843

I 'm looking for good solution too, but Nic is right, the problem has many aspects.

1. sometimes yes, sometimes no. We want to archive some whole projects, and some partial (too old issues)

2. if you dont make it searchable then its a pain to use it if its needed.

3. we have more than 250k issues, and around 100k could be archived so searches, indexing would be faster (hopefully)

4. 5. and 6 are serious questions.

some ppl suggested to make pdf files from issues you want to archive. some say make a backup to xml and import it to an empty jira if archive is needed (this has many downsides, like its an offline archive, plus very hard to put new issues into the xml export).... http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA043/Archiving+a+Project

[Midori]

If you want to go the PDF way, the PDF View add-on can export tens of thousands of issues to a single PDF, and the output format is highly configurable.