I need to search for orphaned tasks from projects that were deleted. Is there a way to do this? These were assigned to someone, but don’t show up in any advanced search unless I know the actual name of the task.
I want to find all of them and clean them up (delete or archive them). Please help! TIA
Are they actually deleted? Or is the project archived?
My testing shows tasks associated with deleted projects look like they get unassociated with the project, but Advanced Search doesn’t appear to count tasks associated with a deleted project as qualifying for the “No Project” filter even though there’s nothing on the task to make this state obvious. @Marie, this feels like a bug or feature request.
@Kim_S I do have a potential workaround for you at the bottom after I demonstrate the issue.
Here’s my testing:
I made a test project called “test delete project” and assigned myself a task:
Then I deleted the project:
Two main things to note here is the task appears to no longer be in a project: Both in the project section and in the task story (i.e. “added to test delete project” disappears).
I then tried to search for the task using myself, “No Project” and “Incomplete” as filters:
The results don’t find the “test incomplete” task:
Instead it’s just a couple personal tasks for myself.
Potential Workaround
There’s a wonky way to kind of do it, but if you have a lot of projects, it’s tough:
Start an advanced search and select Projects->Not in these projects…
Add all of your active projects to this list with other relevant criteria (like assignee, incomplete, etc.)
This will find it (plus any other personal tasks):
Hopefully that might help some (if you have archived projects too, those tasks will show up also).
@Kim_S Can you confirm wether these projects have been archived or canceled?
@RyanE let me do some more digging into this and check with the team, I’ll keep you posted asap!
Hi @Marie
They are projects where we had people assigned to tasks but the project was deleted. Now we’ve had the assignee’s having phantom task reminders showing up in their email. If I have the exact task name, I can find that one task. But I know that there are more out there, so, I was hoping to do a search, find all of them at one time and just delete them or get them pushed into another appropriate project.
Thanks for the additional information @Kim_S, really appreciate it!
I believe you should be able to search for this tasks using the following criteria:
)Unfortunately, I’ve ran a few tests and this doesn’t seem to return tasks assigned from deleted projects. I suspect this could be a bug, so I have gone ahead and escalated a bug to our Development Team; I’ll make sure to keep you posted as soon as I have an update.
@RyanE Thank you so much for taking the time to run tests and share all your screenshots, it was super useful 
