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Deactivating a field is reversible and quiet. Deleting it is neither, and it takes your historical data with it.
Deactivating
A deactivated field disappears from forms and from the ticket interface. What it does not do is disturb anything that already exists.
- Existing tickets keep their values.
- Explore can still report on it, including historically.
- Business rules referring to it keep the reference, though nothing new will set it.
- It can be reactivated at any time and everything comes back.
This is almost always what you actually want.
Deleting
Deleting removes the field and its values from every ticket that had them. That is not a tidy-up; it is a loss of history. Reports covering last year change, and nobody who reads them later will know why.
It also breaks silently. Views, triggers and macros referring to the field do not warn you. They simply stop matching, and finding out why takes far longer than the deletion took.
Deactivate first, wait a month, then decide. If nobody notices in a month, you have your answer and you have lost nothing. If someone does notice, you have learnt what the field was for.
Removing a drop-down value
The same logic one level down. Removing a value from a list leaves old tickets pointing at something that no longer exists, and rules keyed on its tag stop matching. Deactivating the value keeps history intact while preventing new use.
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