I don’t care much for logs, so I’ve been going directly to the omnifocus backup files on my Mac (*) and erasing old files periodically to recover disk space.
I read recently about archiving, but I’m not sure if I can get useful data from it, I mean statistics on completion % vs plan, frequency of rescheduling etc or just security that I can recover what I did some time ago, like an agenda. ANd if I don’t, I might as well save the disk space it will take me to archive.
So I have 2 questions for the community, if you will
1.- Is there any harm done to the Omnificus database by erasing manually these backu files vs archiving?
2.- Is there any sattistics or usage data I can get from my archived files?
Backups are clones of the current database. Archives are extractions (and REMOVAL!) of items from the current database.
1a. The harm is that you will loose the snapshot of the database that you erase. I delete backups that are older than a month.
1b. The only reason archiving is designed the way that it is designed is because, in the days of slow sync, removing stuff from the current database will give you a faster sync. So, archiving removes completed items (yes, it totally REMOVES them). I personally abhor this fact. Someday, someone intelligent may give us a method to archive by user-selectable projects rather than by user-uncontrollable completed tasks. But … I digress.
2.I have found the archives to be unstable for any type of manual operation on them. For example, trying to manually copy + paste into archives is prone to cause duplicate “ghost” folders. I could imagine that you could write an Applescript to cull the number of projects or tasks as a running tally of how much you have “tossed in to the archive file”. But … What would that really mean anyway?
