Is it possible to prevent users from deleting a project? I am aware of the private/public project setting where you can restrict users to only be able to comment, instead of being able to edit. However, I need all my teammates to be able to create/edit tasks in a project, but I do not want them to have the ability to delete the project. This is a VERY important feature for my team, because I want to ensure there is no accidental deletion of my important projects from a careless mistake.
Thank you for the response and suggestion. Although the email is helpful to alert me when a project is deleted, it is still an issue because the project should never be deleted because I have an API script exporting data from the project on a nightly basis.
I believe project and task delete prevention feature is extremely important, I am hoping this is something that is on the roadmap.
I want to echo this as a must fix issue. When this happened on my team we were able to recover the deleted project without long-lasting issue but we need to be able to prevent users from doing this again.
Project deletion should be able to be restricted to a small group of individuals or the project owner-- it should not be available to anyone with general team access.
I agree, a bit shocking this basic user control functionality has yet to be implemented. Makes me extremely cautious about giving users project edit roles which then restricts their ability to be a bit more independent on the project.
By experience, it is harder to get people to do stuff (because they are afraid to break things) rather than having people delete things randomly. But all companies are indeed different!
This just happened to me. When they undid their action - the Asana came back but it was gutted. Most of the information was gone, to include all of the completed tasks which we often mine for various reports. Is there anyway to get this information restored?
First, are you positive itās gone, and not just that your view is showing Incomplete tasks instead of All tasks? I ask because Iāve never seen a project restored that had the behavior you described.
Hi Larry ā yes. I did play with the filters and the āall taskā toggle. Not there. We have reached out the VIP support and they are working it. Thank you.
Iām on a new team and this just happened again to our intake project.
Iām thinking weāre going to have to create a secondary project thatās really locked down so we donāt run the risk of actual information getting deleted but this would all be solved by simply having a third type of access ā āCan Editā, āCan Commentā, āAdminā.
Yes. We were able to restore the project but it shouldnāt have been possible in the first place. A user was attempting to remove it from a portfolio but selected āDelete projectā instead.
Asana relies entirely too much on āgood intentionsā vs good access control policies.
Adding to this thread as my team has just run into this exact issue. A project that was completed but full of helpful historical information was erroneously deleted and the deletion was not discovered until over 30 days had passed. Asana support was able to help recover some but not all of the tasks within.
This has been a costly mistake to us and I would highly recommend that the process for deletion of a project become 1) much more gated, 2) more visible to other members who may have been able to catch the mistake, and 3) more easily recoverable.
For 1), it would be great if there could be an admin-controlled toggle or even a default that projects CANNOT be deleted at all.
For 2), I realize that Asana has already implemented an email that automatically goes out to teammates. In my teamās case, this was sent on a Saturday at 8am, and looked like just another of the thousand or so Asana emails that we all receive. It would be greatly appreciated if something were done to help these emails stand out more (PROJECT DELETION in all caps?), or if the emails were to be resent in the time leading up to the 30 day recovery limit during business hours .
For 3), I saw in another thread that someone suggested having an āoutlook-styleā trash system, where there is a clear list of deleted items that can be restored. In my case, it took over an hour of searching to even figure out that the deletion had even occurred, as any links just went to a ārestrictedā page.
This issue has just happened within our business where we have a āBookings Calendarā project was mistakenly deleted by someone in our team and when we recovered the project most of the vital information fields within each booking/task was deleted and not able to be recovered. This has caused us huge disruption and we simply cannot have this happen again.
If a fix cannot be made for this issue we will have to step away from Asana. Is there a fix happening for this?
@Mark_Mason - welcome to the forum and sorry to hear about this.
Short term
How did you go about restoring the project? Iāve had projects and portfolios accidentally deleted before and never had issues with missing information when restored. What specifically was missing (assignees, comments, field information, etc.)?
Long term
Itās not a perfect solution, but you can make projects deletable by only admins using the project permissions (see below). As long as you set up the right people to be admins vs. editors, it should prevent most of these issues. EDIT: this is only available on enterprise tiers
Good point, @Stephen_Li ! But we should just note that the more granular āProject permissionsā in your screenshot are exclusive to Enterprise tiers.
