GitLab reverses its decision to delete dormant projects

Following an outcry, it now plans to move unused repos to object storage

GitLab has apparently abandoned its plan to automatically erase projects that have been inactive for more than a year and which belong to its free-tier users.

Users voiced their worries about the proposed new policy, and yesterday GitLab released a statement saying that it would no longer remove dormant projects and instead would shift them to object storage, making them slower to access.

"We discussed internally what to do with inactive repositories," GitLab stated on Twitter.

"We reached a decision to move unused repos to object storage. Once implemented, they will still be accessible but take a bit longer to access after a long period of inactivity."

The policy to delete inactive projects was set to take effect in September 2022, and the business anticipated saving up to $1 million a year with this move.

Staff were reportedly to be informed of the upcoming internal meeting on August 9.

"After 2022-09-22 we will be rolling out the Data Retention Policy For Free Users," the notice stated, according to The Register.

"This sub-program will impose limits on the number of months a free project can remain inactive before we automatically delete it and data therein."

Additionally, internal discussions suggested that the code to be used to automatically remove dormant projects was ready by the end of July after months of development work.

However, the news was poorly received, sparking fury on Reddit and Twitter, which seems to have forced a rethink.

A user asked if "inactive" projects refer to "repositories that have no new commits," or "only those without new commits AND without read access by cloning / fetching?"

CEO Sid Sijbrandij's response was less than clear. "All write operations would keep a project active, creating an issue, a merge request, pushing changes to a branch, etc," he said in a Tweet, adding: "We might also keep it active as long as people are doing read operations such as cloning, forking, etc."

Another user sought clarification on "whether non-owners of a repo that had been pushed to object storage will be able to access it."

Sijbrandij replied that their "current plan for object storage…would keep the repos visible to everyone."

The Register noted that owing to the need for multiple backups, transferring inactive repos to object storage could actually raise GitLab's costs for project maintenance.

GitLab has yet to release a public statement on the matter.

About 20% of GitLab users, 6 million accounts, use the free tier, which offers five users per namespace, 5 GB of storage, 10 GB of data transfers, and 400 CI/CD minutes per month.

Paid plans range from $19 - $99 a month.