Administration · 3 min read

Archiving and deleting

The reversible option, the irreversible one, who can do each, and how to choose between them.

Choosing between them

Two ways to take an improvement out of view. They are not variations on a theme — one is reversible and keeps everything, the other destroys the record and its history.

Aspect	Archive	Delete
Reversible	Yes — restore it at any time.	No.
Keeps the audit trail	Yes, in full.	No — the trail is destroyed with the record.
Keeps comments	Yes.	No.
Who can do it	Anyone who can browse the project.	Project administrators only.
Still findable	Yes, via Include archived.	No.

Archive is almost always the right answer. Delete exists for genuine mistakes — a duplicate, a test record, something raised against the wrong project. For anything that was real work, archiving keeps the evidence that it happened.

Archiving

Open the improvement and select Archive. It applies immediately. The record drops out of the register, the board and the dashboard counts, and the change is written to the audit trail.

The action row on a record showing transition buttons, then Edit, Archive and a red Delete.

To find it again, tick Include archived in the register toolbar. Open it and the Archive button now reads Restore; selecting it brings the record fully back.

Archiving suits improvements that are:

superseded by a later, broader improvement;
duplicates of a record you would rather keep;
closed long ago and cluttering the register, where you still want the history.

Archiving is not the same as rejecting. Reject records a decision — with a reason, in the trail, visible in reporting. Archive just tidies. If you decided not to do something, reject it; archive it afterwards if it is in the way.

Deleting

The Delete button appears only if you hold the Jira administer projects permission. Selecting it opens a confirmation panel rather than acting immediately.

A confirmation panel headed 'Delete CSI-5' stating that this removes the improvement, its comments and its entire audit trail, that it cannot be undone, and that archiving keeps the record and its history instead, with Delete permanently and Cancel buttons.

The panel states exactly what is lost and points at archiving as the reversible alternative. Deletion removes:

the improvement itself;
every comment on it;
its entire audit trail, from creation onwards.

There is no undo and no recycle bin. The reference is not reissued — deleting CSI-7 does not make the next improvement CSI-7 — so a gap in the sequence is itself a small signal that something was removed.

Deleting is the only way to remove audit history. The trail has no edit path and no delete path for individual entries; taking the whole improvement is the sole route. In a register kept as compliance evidence, that makes deletion a decision worth taking deliberately rather than as tidying.

What is recorded

The deletion is written to the app's server-side log — noting the reference, who did it, and how many audit events and comments were purged — so a site administrator can establish what happened afterwards. It is not, of course, in the improvement's own trail, because that no longer exists.

A workable convention

Wrong or duplicated at the point of raising → delete it, the same day.
Decided against → reject with a reason, then archive if it is in the way.
Done and finished with → close it, and archive only if the register is genuinely cluttered.
Anything else → archive.