Tell HN: GitHub removed Classic projects and wiped my ideas without warnings | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: GitHub removed Classic projects and wiped my ideas without warnings

12 pointsgzalo6 comments

I've been using github projects for a few years now, mostly to track ideas and ToDos for side projects.

A few weeks ago GH sunsetted the classic github projects: https://github.blog/changelog/2024-05-23-sunset-notice-projects-classic/

This caused me to permanently lose some list of ideas and ToDos I had, because they handled the migration really poorly:

- They never sent any warnings via emails regarding the sunsetting, even though I've had ~10 Classic Projects for a few years

- The "automated migration" they ran migrated only cards last updated within last year. Some cards with ideas/ToDos/backlog weren't really updated within that period so they weren't migrated.

- The changelog mentions that the REST API is still available, but the projects that were partially migrated don't appear anymore. This means that the non-migrated cards cannot really be recovered.

I only hope that some GH employee reads this and can provide a backup of what I had before the migration.

Why would they even impose that arbitrary 1 year limit?

Designing a migration procedure that loses data on purpose seems evil.

In the same boat atm; reaching out to GitHub support and hoping that the lack of API access is just a permissions mixup.

Luckily I was able to screenshot/copy the text for one of my projects before refreshing the page.

Agreed that the 1-year limit makes no sense; it's just a few bits of text.

I was aware that the Classic-style project boards were deprecated, because it had been communicated in the UI for quite a while, but kinda assumed that they would just become read-only, not get deleted.

I had a few such boards both at user- and repo-level which are apparently now gone, and that's annoying because I don't entirely remember how many there were and what all was on them. But it was largely redundant information in my case so no real damage done.

I sympathize with you. Any chance some of that data is embedded in the repo somewhere, or were Projects entirely constructed on their servers? I don’t imagine there would be anything immediately available with formatting, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the content wasn’t in with the repo data somewhere, to make it portable. Worth looking for anyway. Hope you get some of that back. I’m on GitHub pretty consistently, and I hadn’t heard about this either, but I’m pretty strict with filters on my emails, I may have just missed it. Either way, these kinds of decisions that may affect organizations should probably be treated more seriously, throw a notice into the UI maybe.

Update: The support team was able to remigrate all of the cards :D so issue solved. Thanks for the support!

Why would you trust any service that you get for free? They can take it away at any time, for any reason. You need to be responsible for your own data. You should have been making backups, or you should have been keeping your data in software that you control and host yourself.

Aside from convincing Microsoft that there is a good business practice to recover these lost data (did you ask a chat bot to disgorge its annals?), get busy about recreating those projects. The earlier you try it, the better the results.

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