I’ve finally accumulated enough “done” items to look into archiving them. I know there’s an “archiving done items” on the menu, but I have found no information about it. Searching the user’s guide for “archive” or “archiving” finds a single sentence that says nothing more than the menu item, really. The FAQ has nothing, either.
So, first request, please add some (like, any ) detail to the User’s Guide on how archiving works, answering questions like:
Where do the archived items go? What, specifically, happens to them? Do they get moved to an “archive” file, or to an archived project, or both, or neither, or …?
What gets archived? If I have a particular project highlighted in the sidebar so that I’m only looking at that project’s items, is it only that project items that gets archived? Do we have any control over which “done” tasks get archived, e.g. “all tasks with a done date prior to …”?
Is it possible to “undo” archiving, if it turns out it doesn’t work like I want it to work?
Further questions/requests depend on the answers to those. Thanks!
I’ve just added a bit more to that description that I hope clears things up.
They go to the “Archive:” project in your existing outline. If you don’t already have an archive project one is created for you.
All @done items (except for ones that are already in the “Archive:” project) are moved (together with items they contain) into the archive project. There’s no way to limit which ones are moved to a subset.
Yes, undo should work as you would expect. It will change everything back to pre-archive state.
So, more requests then.
Maybe it’s just me, but I’m not really crazy about this scheme. It loses the hierarchical nature of the original data, and no control means yesterday’s @done items get archived with last years. That’s not workable, at least for me.
I would prefer an Archive file, as opposed to an archive project. Then the project hierarchy could stay the same, and we wouldn’t need additional tags, and we wouldn’t have to always see archived items in our open projects (if it’s archived, it’s archived for a reason — I don’t need to see it anymore, but I want it where I can get to it easily). The archive file name could be the existing filename with “archive” prepended or appended, i.e. “archive_filename” or “filename_archive”.
Some control over what is archived would be greatly appreciated, and seems to me to be almost a requirement. I have @done items from yesterday and from last year; I only want the latter archived. I would think it should at the very least obey our current context, i.e. if we have a project selected, then only archive the @dones in that project. But in addition to that, it would be nice to have a date popup (with default of X days from Preferences) that specifies the date cutoff for archiving.
Thanks, as always, for the amazingly swift (no pun intended; OK, maybe a little) response!
These are all good ideas, but I’m unlikely to take them up very soon. For now I want to keep “Archive Done” simple and minimal. The good news is that TaskPaper’s scriptable and there are already some user contributed scripts that implement alternative “Archive Done” commands, some with similar features to what you are thinking about. Check out:
And search around for “done” and “archive” to see a few options.
) detail to the User’s Guide on how archiving works, answering questions like: