What is the best way to delete 2M issues Jira cloud

[Vicky Kharisma]

Hi everyone. 

I was wondering has anyone bulk delete issues at this scale before in Jira cloud? What is the best way to delete issues in the safest way possible. 

I can try script this task but the pagination (limit to 1000) is too painfully slow. 

TIA

[Chris Buzon]

First, why are you deleting that many issues?   there are a number of ways to approach a problem like this, but my initial reaction is that there are other concerns here.  That's a massive number of tickets.

If you have those spread out over many projects, you might just want to archive or delete whole projects. This can be scripted, but if you make a mistake you won't be able to easily get those issues back.

You may also wish to open a support ticket with Atlassian directly, as the scale on this is alarming and you're probably going to run into unseen limitations any way you proceed. 

[Vicky Kharisma]

Long story short - we've had some unintended use case that lead to massive issue creation. There are two project that has 2.5M issues each. Needless to say we're seeing the "unseen challenges" as many things start to falling apart (eg. data backup start failing, slow searches etc). We decided to move the two projects to a different system. Hence we are deleing the millions of issues. 

Is there another approach to consider?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

In this case, I think your best option would be to

• Create two new projects that are set up the same as the two projects that have too many issues
• Find all the issues you want to keep in each project
• Use bulk-edit to move the issues you want to keep into the new projects
• Delete the old overloaded projects - it's a few clicks to do, and Cloud will churn through the issue delete in the background.

If the project delete fails, it should still have deleted some of the issues, but then it becomes a problem you can unload on to Atlassian with a support request, because it's Cloud not doing something right!

[Lukas Lampert]

This app may be a good candidate for this effort: 
https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1215042/mass-delete-for-jira?tab=overview&hosting=cloud