I have what I feel is a very unusual situation
Asked by Elizabeth Sardi:

Hello,

I am faced with a very interesting problem and wanted to turn to those who likely have worked with Atlassian products for longer than me.

So basically, the long and the short is:

The company that I work for just advised me that, "at some point in the past, they had used Jira Cloud (JSM), and decided that they no longer wanted to use the environment."

So, they put all of the administration, user, and project configuration into their environment and then left it behind to use another application (I was not at the company during this time so I cannot provide any additional information).

Some time had passed, and they decided to go back to Jira. Keeping in mind that my interaction with this application at this company is basically blind (it's a bad, bad company; there are no questions about it). Naturally, the lead person building the new Jira Cloud environment created it and has been single-handedly managing it. The person won't communicate and I am totally blind as to what they are doing. I'm less concerned about being blind because honestly atlassian products are easy enough to figure out.

HOWEVER, the inability to plan ahead or stick with any process or application has created a serious problem -- the original data from the first environment is now in the new environment and the (obvious) request is to clear out the data.

I have not seen a way to easily achieve this objection without nuking the environment and starting from scratch. My only thought is the painful thought of manual deletions and restoring the backup with a blank one. I saw atlassian documentation to reset or delete the environment, however, wouldn't you know, the company that I work for already has two other vendors working in the environment to build it out as instructed.

I know that this is a very odd and difficult request, but I am hoping that someone has been shoved into a very uncomfortable position like mine and has developed a better method to complete this wipe without losing new data.


Answers:
author: Paul Wiggers
body: Hello [@Elizabeth Sardi](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/5355932)

Thank you for posting and this seems like a tough place to work in. Lack of communication and even worse, the refusal to help each other out is hard to work with.

What kind of information do you want to delete?

If it is project only data, your best bet might be to start a new project and go from there. A lot of settings are project specific.

For the settings that aren't, unfortunately, there is no reset button. Cleaning it up will require manual labor. You could use the API and Automations to help you with those tasks.  
Perhaps there is an app on the marketplace that might help you out but I can't give any advice on those.

I know that isn't what you are looking for but it's the best I can do.

Some additional unsollicited advice, don't stay to long at this company, especially when the communication isn't improving.

comments: author: Elizabeth Sardi
body: Thank you so much, [@Paul Wiggers](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/4683569) for your feedback. I really appreciate it. I knew when the request was made that what was being asked was very likely not possible (I suspected impossible, tbh, but just wanted to do my due diligence).  

Regarding your additional advice, I totally agree 100%. This has been my primary focus (to get out of this company). It has been clear for a few months now that the longer that I stay the worse that it is going to get.   

I hope all is well for you and wish you a very Happy Holiday!

Thank you so much for everything,

Elizabeth


author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: I am sorry that the answer you got before was misleading - it was generated by an AI that has no understanding of your question or Atlassian software.

I am afraid you have no choice but to manually plough through the data and manually remove it.

Nuking the whole lot is probably not going to be a good option, but it might be. You will be destroying all the new config you have set up. So the first question is "is it worth it"? If, for example, you could recreate your new setup in 10 minutes, but it's going to take 10 days to delete everything manually, it probably is worth cleaning out and starting again.

But if people are using the new stuff a lot, then it's going to be a pain starting again.

There is a bit of method to cleaning out a Jira instance of dead weight. Start at the project level - what projects do you want to keep using, and which ones can be deleted (bearing in mind delete really does mean delete).

If you have some of which you are unsure, leave them until later, but apply a permission scheme to them that says "only admins can see this project". If people are using them, they will let you know very quickly!

"Make it invisible" is the minimum you can do to make your Jira look cleaner, but if you have projects you can definitely delete safely, do it. Project deletion permanently deletes the project and the issues within it, but not the configuration for it if it is a company-managed project.

Once you have deleted all the projects you don't want any more, go over all the global schemes and their sub-items (e.g. workflow schemes contain workflows). You'll find many of the lists are displayed in two sections - active and unused, but some are a simple flat list. There is a delete option in the menu next to all unused items. For a quick run, I use right-click -\> open in new tab when I run through a list, then ctrl-tab to switch to each new tab to click on the "confirm delete" button quickly.

Once you've done projects, take a look at fields. The ideal thing to do is a bit of a slog, but run a search for "\<field\> is not empty" for every field that you think might not be used. If the search comes back with nothing, the field is not in use, so you can delete it. If you get small numbers, go look at the issues that are using it and ask the owners if they really need it.

comments: author: Elizabeth Sardi
body: Thank you [@Nic Brough -Adaptavist-](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/781454) for your response. I appreciate it. This is very much what I suspected. Just wanted to do my due diligence to see if perhaps someone else placed in a very difficult position at a bad company might have developed a less manual approach to Jira Cloud maintenance. I have to think that eventually a company as bad as the one that I am employed by will eventually learn but it's definitely not looking good, haha.   

Thank you again so much for everything!

Happy Holidays!


author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: I spent most of my Atlassian career picking up messy Jiras and trying to fix them and clean them up, to make them better suited to the organisation! I never ran into one that didn't need a human to sift through the data and choose what projects to consider for deletion.

Once the projects are gone though, I have written code that deletes all the unused schemes they were using, although I would say that took longer to script than the (tedious) "click on all the unused ones and open the delete page in a new tab"


Tags: cloud

jira-service-management

jira-service-management-cloud