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Delete Issues

Last modified: 09 October 2024

Deleting issues in YouTrack is not to be taken lightly. Each issue has the potential to contain a wealth of information that, when lost, cannot be recovered easily. In general, we recommend that you avoid deleting issues whenever possible. Here are a few alternatives to deleting issues:

  • If the issue duplicates an existing issue, link it to the existing issue as a duplicate. In this case, the value for the State field is set to Duplicate, which is a resolved state. The issue is excluded from search results for unresolved issues, but any information contained in the issue is retained.

  • If the issue is no longer relevant and you don't want anyone to waste time working on it, select an appropriate value for the State field to resolve the issue. Default states like Can't Reproduce, Won't fix, Incomplete, and Obsolete indicate that the issue does not require additional effort. This helps to explain why an issue should not be fixed without deleting it from the system.

  • If you created an issue in the wrong project, don't delete it and create another. Simply update the value in the Project field.

The best reason that you might have for deleting an issue is because you created it by mistake. If you're confident that an issue that you created is unnecessary, you should be able to delete it without disrupting anyone else's work. Just don't assume that this rule applies to issues that were created by other users.

To delete a single issue:

  1. Open an issue in quick view or single issue view.

  2. Click the Show more option in the issue toolbar.

  3. Select the Delete issue option from the menu.

    Delete issue
  4. Click the Delete button in the dialog to confirm the action.

    • The issue is deleted from YouTrack.

    • The action cannot be undone.

    • To restore the issue, you have to restore a backup copy that contains the issue and import the issue from the backup to your YouTrack database. For more information, see Restoring Deleted Issues.

You also have the ability to delete multiple issues at once with commands. You should be very careful when performing this action, as you can select more issues than can be displayed on the Issues list and delete them in one go. Proceed with caution!

You can also perform this action by applying the delete command to a batch of issues.

Command to delete multiple issues.

To learn more about updating batches of issues with commands, see Apply Commands to Issues.