I don’t see this come up a lot on the forums, and I’ve heard varying opinions about whether or not to use it, but I’ve discovered recently both the need for it and why I appreciate it.
Every so often a prompt comes up to archive old items to help streamline OF’s database, and I had done this once before around this time last year. But I haven’t wanted to archive items very frequently because I enjoy looking at the ‘Completed’ perspective to get a sense of accomplishment (which, I realise isn’t everyone’s jam, but for those of us whose it is, it’s a nice feature to have). So archiving always felt like a last resort, only to be done if necessary, otherwise one would ‘lose’ all that data. I heard an interviewee on one of the podcasts say they never archived because they liked seeing all that historic data, and they never had a problem with their database.
Well, I noticed the little text notification ‘Saving to OmniFocus cache’ popping up with increasing frequency, to the point where it was doing it multiple times per editing just one task entry. This was true on my M1 Mac Mini and on my M2 MacBook Air. So, figuring the database may have been getting a bit bloated, I took the plunge and, for the second time ever, archived old data (completed or dropped prior to 1st January). I selected the same folder where my existing Archive is saved, but thought no more of it, just let OF do its thing. What I hadn’t realised would happen, was that OF of course merged the existing archival data with the newly-archived data this time around, meaning that the Archive grew to include all previously archived data.
Of course once the archive was done, OF started behaving much more smoothly (an experience which I hope will carry across a bit to the iPad as to my experience that is sometimes the most glitchy, although that may be to do with the age and spec of my iPad). But also realising that the archival data merged in this way meant that I knew I could enjoy going back through the old data whenever I wanted just by opening the Archive file, without it clogging up and slowing down my active database.
These things may not matter to anyone else, but it’s a nice behaviour to the archive feature, to know that it will accumulate all your historic data over the years each time you archive.
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Technically speaking, an archive is an historical record that is created once and not amended thereafter. Counter to this, OF is making a selective, snapshot backup of your database, followed by removing content that was transferred to the snapshot backup. In spite of the negative connotation of the term, the process of archiving in OF should perhaps be better considered as “culling” your database, not archiving it. Indeed, the original intent of archiving as I recall was sometimes promoted exactly for the result you see – it results in faster syncing of the database to other devices.
Finally, with regard to archiving (versus culling) in the database, one frustration has never yet been resolved over the many decades of development of OF. Users still cannot truly archive entire projects in a one-step, efficient manner.
To summarize, while the benefits are apparent, some folks (e.g. me) also recognize significant downsides and simply avoid the archiving process in OF all together (preferring to struggle through a tedious manual process to do a truer archiving approach).
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JJW
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I appreciate archiving, and do, but I’d rather OF move to a more complex sync store format that can quickly diff recent changes without losing history. (It seems it would mean moving further away from the database as a portable document, but maybe I’m missing a way for that not to be the case.)
I am wondering, what’s your manual archiving process, if you can share ?
I have (manually) set up the Archive folder structure to be the same as the main OF database. I have two methods to archive projects. In each case, I have the main OF database open and the Archive database open, showing each in separate halves of the screen. Each has the Projects perspective active, and the left panel is opened.
- Method 1 (tedious but failsafe) - Select the projects to archive from the main database. Copy them (command-C). Activate the Archive database. Select in the Archive at the bottom of the list of Projects. Paste the clipboard (command-V). The clipboard projects will appear in the bottom of the list of Projects. Unfortunately, they also may carry over their source folder sub-structure. Select the newly copied projects and move them (by dragging) into their proper folder sub-structure location. Delete any spurious folders at the bottom of the Projects list. Delete the source projects in the active OF database.
- Method 2 (sometimes quicker but typically less assured) - Select the projects to archive from the main database. Drag them to their proper folder sub-structure location in the Archive database. This method moves the project(s). This method seems to be more reliable when I have only one project to archive. Alternatively, this method is also more reliable when I have only one project to archive and when I drag the project to the end of the Project list in the Archive database rather than trying to drag to its proper folder sub-structure location. In all cases, the project in the active OF database still has to be deleted after it has been archived.
A feature request from a few decades ago remains unanswered. To fulfill true archiving from OF, the app should provide a method to Archive Project(s) and Restore Archived Project(s), e.g. by context clicking on a project (or projects) in the active or Archive database.
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JJW
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