Moving your history across

What happens to four years of ticket history when you migrate

Four years of tickets is usually the reason a migration stalls. Most of it transfers intact, some is transformed on the way across, and two things do not come over at all.

Published Sep 30, 2026 · Cadenta

What transfers intact

Issues, their full comment threads, attachments, status history, assignee history, labels, and due dates transfer with their original timestamps and authorship. A ticket closed in March 2023 still reads as closed in March 2023, by the person who closed it.

Relationships between issues transfer as links. Parent and child survive to two levels.

What is transformed

Three things change shape rather than carrying across unchanged, and each one needs a decision during setup rather than a mapping rule.

Transformations, and what decides them
From	Becomes	Decided by
More than four workflow states	Three fixed plus one custom	Which source states collapse into which
Sub-tasks three or four levels deep	Two levels, deeper items promoted	Where to cut the hierarchy
Per-board custom fields	Project fields, or dropped	Which fields are still read

What does not come across

Board automations do not transfer. Automation models differ enough between tools that a translated rule is usually wrong in a way nobody notices for a month, so they are rebuilt during setup and tested against live work.

Time entries transfer as totals per issue, not as individual entries with their own timestamps. If per-entry history is a billing or compliance requirement, the source system stays as the record for the closed period.

Where the archive lives

Issues closed before the migration window import as read-only history by default. They are searchable, linkable, and visible on the issue they relate to, and they do not appear in active views or in the portfolio rollup.

The window is a setting. Teams most often take two years as active and everything older as archive, though the whole four can be active if the rollup is expected to reach back that far.

Verifying the move

Cadenta imports into a staging project first, and the comparison is counts: issues by status, comments by issue, attachments by issue, and any issue whose comment count differs between systems. That list is reviewed before the cutover rather than after.

A four-year, twelve-project history typically produces a reconciliation list in the low dozens, almost all of it attachments that exceeded a size limit in the source system.

Frequently asked questions

What happens to four years of ticket history when you migrate project tools?

Issues, comments, attachments, status and assignee history, labels and due dates transfer with their original timestamps and authorship. Workflow states collapse to three plus one custom, sub-tasks flatten to two levels, and board automations are rebuilt rather than translated. Time entries arrive as per-issue totals rather than individual entries.

Can we keep old tickets without cluttering active views?

Yes. Issues closed before the migration window import as read-only archive: searchable, linkable, visible on related issues, and excluded from active views and the portfolio rollup. The window is a setting, and two years active with everything older archived is the most common choice.

How do we know nothing was lost?

The import runs into a staging project first and produces a reconciliation list: issues by status, comments per issue, attachments per issue, and anything whose counts differ between the two systems. You review that list before cutover. A four-year, twelve-project history usually lists a few dozen items, mostly attachments that hit a size limit in the source.