Should projects in dropped folders be archived?

I did a search today and discovered some very old projects that were contained in a dropped folder. My guess is at some point I dropped the folder without dropping the projects inside. If I try it now, the same thing happens - the interior projects are left active, but are not easily accessible.

So, two questions:

  1. Should projects inside of a dropped folder be automatically marked as dropped?
  2. Should dropped folders eventually be archived? Right now, I can see any folder I’ve ever created even if they haven’t been used in years.
  1. I’d prefer this be handled by the user, not automatically. Can’t you just re-activate the folder and drop the projects individually?

  2. The inability of OmniFocus to allow a user to have manual control on what is or is not archived as well as the total munge job that happens when a user does attempt to archive projects manually has been ongoing since OF1. I hate to say this but, any requests to change the archiving features of OF seem to fall on deaf ears. Otherwise, I would say that what is being archived are tasks that are completed. Your projects and folders are still hanging around because, even though they are dropped (or inside a dropped folder), they still have tasks that have never been completed. I would dearly wish that OmniGroup would take a bit of time to revamp this part of OF to allow manual archiving before they jump to the next big flashy and new feature.


JJW

Right now folders themselves aren’t specifically archived, so marking a folder as Dropped will not impact what gets archived. Instead, when a folder (whether Active or Dropped) contains completed or dropped items, when those items get archived the folder will also be included in the archive to maintain the structure/hierarchy of your data.

If you want a folder and all of its content to be moved to your archive, you’ll first want to drop all projects within that folder. As covered before, when those projects get archived the folder they belong to will as well. Once that happens the folder will still remain in your active database. If you no longer need it, you can simply delete it.

I agree that this could certainly be improved to be more intuitive and easy to do. While we’ve not made any changes to the archive functionality in some time, these are issues that still factor into what we decide to work on. To this point, we’ve prioritized other work, but I’ll make sure to add your confusion and @DrJJWMac’s thoughts to our development database.

1 Like

@valyria Thank you for the explanation about folders and archiving. I have a followup question and figured it would be better in the same thread instead of starting a new one.

Take for an example a folder that contains three projects.

I mark all three projects as completed.

I believe the following is correct:

  • Before I archive the projects, in all view settings except for show ‘All’, the folder appears empty.
  • After I archive the projects, the folder is always empty because the projects are archived.

After archiving the completed projects, what should I do with the empty folder?

Can I just delete it, since in the archive, it is already preserved as part of archiving the projects?
Or should I mark the folder as dropped?

I never intend to use the folder again.

Thank you for your help!

If you’ve archived the projects in a folder and don’t plan to use it again, you can just delete that folder.

One additional thing to note is that folder will exist your archive database as a container for those projects that you did archive. Everything in your archive will have the same hierarchy as it did when it was in your active database. i.e. if you have an action in a project inside of a folder, when that action gets archived a copy of both the project and the folder will also be added to the archive even though they are still in use.

1 Like

Bump.

Let’s get some action on this please.

–> Allow a user to archive MANUALLY and by PROJECT or FOLDER

The current scheme has been this way now for six years. In addition, any attempts to archive manually by copy + paste show, this is still horribly crippled (BROKEN). Folders can no longer be copied and pasted into the archive directly. Sub-level folders get duplicated as empty folders at the root level when their underlying Projects are copied + pasted.


JJW