Trash & Restore

Deleting a work item or a project does not destroy it. Lithora marks it deleted, hides it from every view, and keeps it recoverable for 30 days — after which a scheduled job removes it for good.

What delete actually does

Delete is a soft delete. The record is stamped with who deleted it and when, and is then filtered out of every read in the product: boards, backlog, timeline, calendar, search, analytics, the public share view and the AI assistant. To the workspace it is gone. To the Trash it is recoverable.

30 days

The recovery window, counted from the moment of deletion. Each row shows the days it has left.

Self-service restore

Any member of the workspace can put an item back — no support ticket, no admin.

Then a real purge

A scheduled sweep permanently removes anything past 30 days. That step is irreversible.

Restoring something

Go to Settings → Trash.
Pick the tab you need: Work for work items, Containers for projects.
Find the row. Each one shows when it was deleted and how much of the window is left (“12 days left”, or “purging today”).
Click Restore. The item returns to its board, backlog and search results, and is re-indexed for the AI assistant.

The Trash only lists items still inside the window and only within workspaces you belong to. Anything older is already scheduled for purge, so it is not shown with a Restore button that would fail.

Deleting a project takes its work with it

On delete

Deleting a project soft-deletes every live work item under it in the same gesture. Work items that were already in the Trash keep their original deletion date — their own 30-day clock does not restart.

On restore

Restoring the project brings back exactly the work items that went down with it. Work you had deleted separately, before the project, stays in the Trash — restore those individually.

Restore the project before its work items

Restoring a work item whose project is still in the Trash is refused with “Restore the parent project first — it is also in the Trash.” Otherwise the item would come back into a container nobody can open. Restore the project first; in most cases that brings the work item back with it and there is nothing left to do.

While a project is in the Trash it denies access to everything under it, and no new work can be created in it.

Permanent deletion

Delete forever on a Trash row skips the remaining window and removes the item immediately. It asks for confirmation, and it cannot be undone — the item is not recoverable from anywhere afterwards.

Action	Who can do it
Open the Trash / Restore	Any member of the workspace the item belongs to. Guests cannot.
Delete forever (purge)	The workspace owner, a workspace admin, or the person who created the item.

If you are a member and not the creator, the purge is refused with “Permanently deleting an item is restricted to a workspace admin or its creator”. Restore still works — ask an admin if the item genuinely has to disappear now.

What a purge removes

Purging is where the real cascade finally runs: the item itself plus its dependencies, comments, status history, work-graph edges and search embeddings. That is exactly why it is a second, deliberate action rather than something an ordinary delete can trigger.

Edge cases worth knowing

Past 30 days, restore is refused. The row is gone from the listing, and a restore attempt answers that the item is outside the retention window. The Trash window is 30 days on every plan, and it cannot be extended from the product.
The AI stops citing trashed work immediately. Deleting an item removes it from the search index, so “Ask your workspace” cannot quote it. Restoring re-indexes it, and it becomes citable again within moments.
Integrations do not resurrect it. A trashed work item stays trashed even if its linked pull request keeps moving. Restore it before expecting GitHub status sync to touch it again.
Restoring is not a version rollback. It returns the item exactly as it was at deletion. It does not undo the edits made before that.
The Trash covers work items and projects. Files have their own retention — see Storage.

If you cannot find what you deleted

Wrong tab. Work items and projects are listed separately — check Containers as well as Work.
Wrong workspace. The Trash only shows items from teams you are a member of. If a colleague deleted it in a team you are not in, ask them or an admin of that team.
Someone purged it. A creator or admin may have used Delete forever. There is no recovery path after that.
It was never deleted. An item can vanish from a board because of a filter or a status change. Try search before assuming a delete — the command palette searches across the workspace.