Hi
I am worry gitlab will delete my projects (long time not used) because i am using free account. If i buy gitlab premium, get i get rid of this?
thanks
Peter
I don’t believe there is any such policy for projects to be deleted. You can download them yourself anyway, when the project is selected in the top right hand corner, you will see something like this:
clicking that download arrow to the left of the clone button gives you the option to download in a variety of formats. Alternatively, you can install your own Gitlab server and then import the projects, and then they will never get deleted for the entire life you run your own server.
Thanks iwalker, please take a look
https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/04/gitlab_data_retention_policy/
https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/administration/inactive_project_deletion.html
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Well nothing to worry about just yet:
Guess we’ll have to see as and when Gitlab notify everyone about it that the feature is enabled or when users receive notifications about it before it gets deleted. Although at the end of the Register article:
I have all my projects cloned locally on my disk anyway that I do have on gitlab.com. That said, I run my own private instance anyway, and as per the docs, I don’t have that feature enabled.
In short, best to run your own Gitlab instance than use gitlab.com.
The bigger question is if these limits will start to creep into the self-managed instances as that will just force everyone away from Gitlab altogether. Sometimes I wonder who makes these decisions at Gitlab, as they go from bad to worse.
It’s enough to search through the forum posts here on some of the steps already taken - price hikes, user/namespace limits. I’m wondering what other weird and wonderful decisions will be made 
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Hi Ian,
the planned limits only apply to GitLab.com SaaS, and not to self-managed instances. We are committed to our stewardship of GitLab: The open source codebase will not contain any artificial limits (repositories, users, size, performance, requiring a trademarked header, etc.).
Kind regards,
Michael
2 Likes
Hi Michael,
Is that a new thing the stewardship? Or has it been around a while?
Hi Ian,
the stewardship page has been here for many years and is embraced by everyone following our values. I could track the Git history to 2016 when a new website was built. Everyone can follow the update history; at the bottom there is a URL that says View page source
If you’d like to make suggestions to the stewardship page or any other page, you can fork the project and contribute 
Cheers,
Michael
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Good to know thanks for the info.
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the “Pending deletion” menu is appears now, gitlab is going to do that