A project has one of three statuses. There are no others — if you are looking for "finished" or "in preparation", those are states a project cannot hold.

Normal work. The project takes candidates, sends messages, and counts as open in reports.

The recruitment is suspended but not closed — the client froze the budget, say. The project keeps its candidates and data, it just drops out of day-to-day work.

The recruitment is finished. The data stays and the project leaves the default list view, because the list opens with the Active filter. Archiving can be undone: select the project on the list and choose Restore from the plus menu.

This is the moment the GDPR clock starts, if your administrator set the retention period to count from project closure. Archiving is therefore not a purely cosmetic tidy-up.

The status is changed from the project header or from the list: select one or more projects and the plus menu offers Change status, Archive (close) project, Tags and Delete project. With archived projects selected, Restore is there instead. By default the list shows only active projects.

The plus menu after selecting projects on the list

If a project has "disappeared", nine times out of ten it was archived and you are looking at the list with its default filter. Remove the status filter or pick the Archived status. A list without any status filter shows projects in every status.

The list without a status filter: active and archived projects together

These are two different things. Archiving hides the project, keeps the data and can be undone. Deleting a project (Delete project in the plus menu after you select it) is an administrator operation and is irreversible: the project disappears, the candidates stay in the candidate database.