Forum Discussion
Archive a project in Azure DevOps
Is there a way to archive projects? I'd like to hide the project from the organization home page. I don't want to delete it.
Thanks
Hi gresdawg ,
Have you considered the following workaround?
1. Create a special identity (e.g. DevOps Archive Admin) in AAD.
2. Modify permissions of those old projects by setting that identity as the only Project Administrator and remove other members and groups. In this way they can become invisible to regular users.
3. In case of an audit, login to AzDO with this identity to show auditors all those "hidden" projects.
I'm curious if you see any issues for using this approach.
- It is really crazy there is no archival mechanism. I hated to read this.
Any update on this feature? We are growing our adoption of Azure, and have some inactive projects that we would like to hide, but not delete.
I would also like to know if archiving is possible. For Audit purposes we need to keep the data just not allow everyone to view it.
- I would also be interested in this. Any idea on how to do it ?
I have this same need. We have years of projects in the Azure DevOps environment that were converted from the old VTFS. As we expand the team using the product, we need to Archive & Hide those old and closed projects.
- I do not have any other solution except pre-fixing my projects with old. 🙂
I am not sure how they want to proceed, but I hope we will have a solution soon.
I would also like to know how to do this. I have some old projects that have similar names to current projects. It would be nice to hide the old projects so that my eyes do not get confused.
- I agree, it would be more than nice to have this possibility. Not sure what is the approach that Microsoft would like to have for this, but I still hope.
The answer, technically, is that no out-of-box solution exists for archiving (or even doing on-demand backups for that matter) of your ADO Service data. If you're using ADO Server then you have the power to do whatever you want. As the goal, in your case, is to hide older data, however, the answer begs a few questions: (1) what data do you need to keep (2) how are your teams structured, (3) what repos are you using, and (4) how often does the process need to run? Keep in mind, Microsoft's written guidance is to create a single Team Project per business unit, organization with some exceptions (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/organizations/projects/about-projects?view=azure-devops) Therefore, a simple answer may be to create a separate Team Project for archiving and move all repos to that project through the use of automation or manually (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/repos/git/import-git-repository?view=azure-devops). Our organization? We don't care much about the Work Item history so we grab the data and store it in Azure files once it becomes no longer necessary. There is a User Voice around backups but it doesn't have a lot of traffic. (https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/content/idea/365441/provide-a-backup-service-for-visual-studio-team-se.html)
Thank you for your answer. I will look into the option you mentioned which does not sound bad for now. Our way of functioning is the creation of a project entry per product, so we do have a lot of projects going on.
Thank you all for your support.
If you go to
Click - Create your template and then choose the options to save/load from a local machine.This will give you a zip folder of files that you can then re-load into a devops instance and it will have all of the things you had in there using the same site.You can then create a DevOps project and create store archive folders with the archive zip and a Readme.md file in each describing how to load it (using that tool) and what it is.I do not know much about the tool but I have used it to save and share DevOps Projects.
