Effects of archiving, restoring, and deleting sites

This section describes the effects of archiving, restoring, and deleting a site, and the impacts of those actions upon the site's associated assets.

The following events occur when you archive a site:

• Site appears as archived in the Sites list.
  

  

• Visitors receive an error 404 when attempting to view any assets associated with the site. For example, if a visitor bookmarked any page associated with Site A, visiting the bookmark returns an error 404.
• Administrators can restore the site.

The following events occur when you restore a site:

• Site appears normally in the Sites list.
• Visitors can resume viewing assets associated with the site.

The following events occur when you delete a site:

• Site no longer appears in the Sites list.
• Site is entirely deleted from the database.
• Visitors receive a 404 when attempting to view any assets associated with the site.
• Administrators cannot restore the site.

This section describes how archiving and deleting sites impacts the assets associated with those sites.

Before archiving a site

A publisher operates four sites: Global, Site A, Site B, and Site C. An editor working on Site A publishes Article 1. In addition, that editor grants Site B access to Article 1, and also publishes the article to Site C.

The following table summarizes how Brightspot manages Article 1 on all three sites.

Archiving Site A

Archiving Site A does not modify Article 1. The article's status (draft, published, revision, workflow), date last updated, ownership, permissions, and all other properties remain the same.

However, because Site A is now archived, editors cannot switch to that site and modify Article 1. Brightspot indicates this state by listing None as the article's owner in the Sites list. Site B still has access to Article 1, so editors working on Site B can link to and modify that asset. (If no site has access to Article 1, it becomes read-only for all editors.)

The following table summarizes how Brightspot manages Article 1 on all three sites after archiving Site A.

Site	Back end	Front End
Site A	Editors cannot work on Site A, so they cannot modify Article 1.	Visitors on site A can no longer view Article 1 at site-a.com/article-1; they receive an error 404.
Site B	Editors working on Site B can modify Article 1, and can link to Article 1 in their assets.	Visitors on site B can no longer view Article 1 at site-a.com/article-1. Links to Article 1 from Site B are removed, but the link text remains.
Site C	Editors working on Site C cannot modify Article 1.	Visitors on site C can view Article 1 at site-c.com/article-1.

Restoring Site A

Restoring a Site A allows editors to resume working on it before it was archived. They can edit Article 1, and visitors to Site A can resume viewing it. Brightspot manages Article 1 between Sites A, B, and C as described in "Impact on assets," above.

Deleting Site A

When you delete Site A, Brightspot changes the ownership of all its assets to the Global site. There is no other impact on Article 1: its status (draft, published, revision, workflow), permissions, and content all remain the same. Therefore, editors working on the Global site and Site B can modify Article 1.

The following table summarizes how Brightspot manages Article 1 on all three sites after deleting Site A.

Brightspot does not delete any assets associated with Site A. Editors working on the Global site or Site B can delete those assets individually. For details, see Permanently deleting an asset.