Why aren't Archives backed up to the cloud? [They can be!]

OmniFocus
1

I’ve been a paying Omnifocus customer for probably close to a decade, but some of its sync features are still a bit difficult for me to wrap my head around.

My understanding is that my $100/Year OmniFocus Subscription allows me to use Omni Sync Server, which syncs current Omnifocus data across my devices, but my Archive is saved locally.

It seems like an odd choice to not have the tool automatically back up everything to a central cloud location. I can’t imagine my historical tasks would take up a ton of space in a cloud database somewhere, and like most people, my digital life is spread across a bunch of devices, making accessing my current local Archive to be pretty onerous. I’m positive that I’ve lost data along the way when migrating to a new MacOS device.

Additionally, with the power of AI tools to make meaning of “digital exhaust”, I’m surprised Omnifocus makes it so difficult to review and analyze tasks completed in the past (as an example, the inability to use Custom Perspectives in my Archive is odd).

I find the “we want to keep the desktop app responsive” rationale to be pretty flimsy. I’ve paid for tools like Evernote, Are.na, Pinboard, Raindrop, Asana, Instapaper, and more with 10,000+ items, with no noticeable performance issues.

As I see it, there are a few different issues that arise as a result of separating “current” data and “archive” data in in the way that Omnifocus currently handles it:

  • Data Loss - requiring the user to manage their own archive introduces risk of data loss
  • Feature parity - the archive seems to be treated as a 2nd-class citizen in terms of functionality like using Custom Perspectives
  • Integrations - can’t really use AI tools or an MCP Server to access my archive if it’s on a different device.
  • Review, Reflection, and Visualization - Omnifocus doesn’t seem to support a robust set of tools for visualizing current or past work. (Burndown charts, Spotify Wrapped-like recap showing the projects I worked on, etc)
2

Even a decade of tasks from being a paying customer for a decade? What about if you never delete a task ever and like me at peak usage, you’re working through more than 100 actions a day?

You have to realise that every person uses OF differently. E.g. many people attach documents to tasks, so even if your archive isn’t massive, some may well be.

I’ve heard of people using OF as CRM databases, reminder tickers, reference document storage.

I also Wonder how relevant tasks from 3 years or more ago are for the majority of customers.

There’s then performance to consider alongside how well the functionality could be built into the cloud (very different to a local archive)

1 Like
3

Like you said, everyone uses OF differently. I log every gift I’ve given or received, so tasks 3+ years old are certainly still relevant to me.

I refuse to believe that OF usage is somehow more nuanced or complicated than tons of other tools (email, notes, bookmarking, etc) that not having cloud sync in the year 2026 is somehow a feature and not a bug.

Even in the use cases you provided – CRM databases, reminder tickers, reference document storage – I can’t think of a single tool that doesn’t provide historical cloud backup for paying customers.

4

But tools designed to do that, with costs and limitations related to the purpose of the tool. You can store 10 years of photographs in Apple Photos, but depending on the amount of storage you need it’s going to cost you more due to the historical data you store in it.

I wasn’t implying that Omnifocus couldn’t do it, I don’t believe it was designed to do it.

If you want this feature, email the support team and let them know.

5

Allowing to create their own automatic or manual strategy to backup to a cloud or local device without having to shut off or override or avoid conflicts with a built-in cloud backup might seem a wonderful choice to others. Especially because backup options engage a constantly evolving, oft deeply personal set of decisions.

Here, you must separate the approach used to cull tasks in OF versus a request to backup the culled tasks in the cloud. The approach to cull a local OF database (what is mistakenly called “archiving”) arose out of the limitations in upload speed from about two decades ago. That this approach has not changed in the meantime is worthy of its own rant. That you want to include an automatic cloud backup of the entire OF database as a feature is an entirely separate discussion, one not to be tied to the rationale (flimsy as it might now be in this day and age) for removing tasks from the OF database to reduce its size for increased upload/download speed.

When/If you do post a feature request for improvements in handling “archives” in OF, consider starting with a baseline that OmniGroup should adopt a true archiving approach, not a “culling” approach, by pulling out only completed projects (not tasks) from an active OF database.

Otherwise, I have to imagine that, with a systematic approach, you could probably find/develop tools to handle all the oversights you want using (a copy of) your active database.

–
JJW

1 Like
6

My argument is that the separation between an “Active” OF Database and a culled / Archived one is confusing, and counter to how most modern productivity software is designed.

However, you do bring up an interesting point. Either through users’ misunderstanding or Omnigroup’s confusing messaging, folks are probably Archiving old items more frequently than they need to, inadvertently making that older content more difficult to access. It probably should be positioned as a semi-permanent culling or fracturing of one’s corpus.

7

Such contentions have been raised sporadically for a good decade or more. Welcome on board.

Taking the past as an indication, I’ve chosen to never use the automatic archive process in OF. I slug through the tedious archiving process manually. Not because I am interested in having tools to visualize current or past work using the detailed approaches that you mention. Rather because I do not want tasks to disappear from projects in my database based on some random date criteria. I want to see a project in detail, active and completed tasks, through to its final completion. I adamantly prefer to put a completed project into an archive, not cull parts of projects into a side-storage bin.

ADD ON: By analogy in this case, OF behaves an app that allows you to assemble tasks, not manage projects. Putting tasks into projects is the same as tagging or flagging them. Maintaining the robust integrity of a project as an entity in its own right takes a back seat to the intent to manipulate individual tasks in various ways.

–
JJW

8

I’m not sure this is a fair characterization. As a personal task manager, OF was developed following the GTD approach, in which “project” means any desired outcome that takes more than one step to achieve. Actions are steps toward that outcome. What’s most important is to have a clearly defined outcome and a clear sense of the next concrete step to take to move toward that outcome.

As such, there is a difference between tagging and flagging actions, on the one hand, and assigning them to a project, on the other. The former are attributes of the action itself; to make a call, I need my phone. The latter is a statement that this specific task contributes to a broader goal that, by itself, is an “amorphous blob of un-do-ability.”

Given the personal focus of OF, it doesn’t seem to me that projects are meant to have “robust integrity,” unlike project planning applications such as OmniPlan or Microsoft Project, which involve multiple people and resources, and often have complex dependencies. David Allen encourages readers of Getting Things Done not to over-plan their projects. That’s why the minimal GTD implementation requires identifying one next action for each project and the place or tool required to do it.

I understand why people want OF to archive only completed projects and single actions, and to leave completed tasks from active projects in the main database. But I also understand why Omni Group developed the archive mechanism they did.

9

The approach is bottom up rather than top down. Assemble tasks into “projects”, not populate projects with mission, aims, resources, time lines, and … yes … tasks.

It is not that I ask to have the existing mechanism removed. Just rename it (Trim database would be more appropriate than Archive database), provide a setting to allow a user to opt out entirely from “trimming” (no more periodic nagging that my database needs to be archived), and provide a method that is truer to the meaning of creating an archive (i.e. maintain the integrity of projects).

–
JJW

1 Like
10

Again, I don’t think that’s correct. The OF approach is more like this:

Define a desired outcome, as precisely as possible.

Can it be done in one step? If the answer is yes, put it on a list of actions to do. If the answer is no, then it is a project, and it goes on a list of projects. To make it actionable, though, you need to do the minimum of defining the next one-step action that you can take to make progress toward it.

That, plus places or tools required (contexts, or tags), is all that’s required to ensure that (1) no desired outcome gets lost because you didn’t write it down, and (2) no desired outcome seems too amorphous to actually do anything about.

It is not “bottom up” by any means. I don’t create actions and then assemble them into projects. I start with a project (e.g., “Apply for proof of Canadian citizenship”), then think, “OK, this is going to take many steps, so what’s the first?”

What it is not is carefully defining “missions, aims, resources, time lines,” because those are overkill for most personal projects, except perhaps tools or places that are required. In my example, the next step is “Visit website and make a checklist of required documents”, and I would give it a tag of “Computer: Internet” because that’s not the kind of thing I can do on my phone.

The point of a regular review is to allow this fairly minimal level of task planning to work by regularly reviewing your desired outcomes, seeing whether any of them are stalled because you haven’t identified a concrete next action, and in that case, specifying one.

If I were planning to permanently move to Canada, on the other hand, I would want to plan much more thoroughly, because that is a complex project with multiple dependencies and much higher stakes.

In practice, I find that some projects, in the GTD sense, can be treated as actions in OF because they are routine and habitual. If a student asks me for a recommendation, I’ll usually just put it on a single-action list of recommendations, because I’ve written enough that the steps are second nature.

11

I agree that GTD says that, but I found myself realising that I think like @DrJJWMac in a bottom up way.

I usually record an action in my inbox and then as I think about it in processing, if it’s actually multiple steps it becomes a project.

Building from a single action into a project rather than starting with an outcome and fleshing it out into project.

this is probably a reflection on me being in a ground level frame of mind when recording these things rather than working at 20,000 feet.

12

You start with something that you would like to do. You put a collection of steps into that “to do” idea and call it a project.

This is project creation. But, now, show me how OF allows you to assign the project to visualize effortlessly with other projects on a Kanban board. Or how OF allows you to attach multiple resource documents to that project in a visual cork-board framework. Or generate a time line view of the key project stages (concept, test, design, implement).

The fact that you create a collection of tasks by thinking about something to do and calling that to do a project does not make you a project manager. Indeed, by this next statement …

You immediately admit to being at the level of task management, not project management.

I do not disagree that you can create projects in OF. I do not disagree that you can manage those created projects in modest ways in OF. I disagree that, because of these basic features, we should allow OF to be called a project management tool. At its core, OF puts tasks as its first class citizens.

Which sustains what I’ve said above. Projects management is from top down. Single action lists are not top-down managed.

In summary … OF focuses on task management first, and allows basic levels of project management on top of this. The basic level of project management it provides is exceptionally useful, simply because, being rather basic, it is thereby consumable by almost anyone.

By example, a significant majority of my projects in OF are linked directly to project figures in Curio. I display those figures on a Kanban board. I track the Focus (_active, _available*,* _awaiting, …) and priority and RoI and other things for the project fully in Curio. As needed, I devote entire Curio projects to a specific project in OF, whereby I pull in the document resources that supplement and complement the project (e.g. in your trip to Canada, Curio would store maps of my planned route and Website links to hotels – entirely a cumbersome exercise to do in OF itself).

–
JJW

13

Returning to the original question headlining this thread: with OmniFocus 4, you can place your archive anywhere your Mac can save files. So your archive can be stored in iCloud Drive, or in a synced OmniPresence folder, or wherever.

(Many of the other posts in this thread have drifted from that question, so I think I’ll reply to those in a separate post so we can keep that post with the others if we split things off into a separate thread.)

14

The archive database was initially designed as a separate database that you could open and edit independently from your main database. The intent was that you should be able to simply drag and drop or copy and paste content between the two databases, so manually archiving a project or folder would be as simple as dragging it to the archive.

We quickly realized that we also needed a way to archive individually resolved items to keep around as reference material. I might want to be able to refer to the history of tasks that I did last year (or 20 years ago), but I rarely need to keep those in my active database. (Unless they’re part of an active repeating group of items, of course—in which case I very much need to keep them around so they’re included when the group next repeats.)

So the built-in command to Archive Old Items… was meant to provide another way to sort through the resolved items in your database and move them to an archive that you can refer to later.

You don’t have to mix these methods of archiving, of course. You don’t even have to have an archive database. Or if you wish you can clone your database archive and have multiple archives that you use for different purposes.

Hope this helps explain some of the design!

15

I don’t immediately admit to anything; I am saying that within the definitions used by GTD, which is the system on which OmniFocus was based, that is what the word “project” means. And I find that for projects that are primarily personal, that definition and the GTD approach work absolutely fine for me, including complex multi-year projects like researching, writing, and publishing a scholarly book.

For full-fledged team-based, dependency-driven, resource-intensive projects, the Omni Group makes another product, called OmniPlan.

For what it’s worth, if you go to the Omni Group’s home page, you’ll see that they describe OmniFocus as “powerful task management software” and OmniPlan as intended to “manage complex projects.” In that sense, they agree with you.

If we were analytical philosophers, we could simply say that the GTD sense of project is “project[subscript]1” and the kind of project that needs full-fledged project management software and a project manager is “project[subscript]2”. Here, though, I think it’s enough to say that the word has multiple meanings depending on context.

Edited to add: I completely agree with you that any multi-step goal (“project”) requires reference material that is best kept somewhere other than OmniFocus. I’m a proponent of using specialized tools as long as it doesn’t make it harder for me to keep track of where things are. (When my access to email was through a Unix terminal shell, I used the mh suite of commands, not mail.) For that reason, I almost never put attachments in OF, because I want to keep my personal project manager database relatively lean.

16

@Geoffairey I often do what you do; in fact, I often enter something in my Inbox with “(make into project)” appended.

My interpretation of what @DrJJWMac says, though, is not that he thinks in a bottom up way, but that OmniFocus is designed for a bottom up way. He seems to me to prefer a top-down approach. If I am wrong, he can correct me.

One thing I have learned about myself over the years is that I am sometimes (often?) tempted to use planning as a form of procrastination from doing. Some things have to be planned out very carefully, to maximize resource use, limit the risk of failure, demonstrate to outside stakeholders that you have a plan, etc. In my academic career, I have done a lot of planning like that. But for things that depend primarily on me, that can be overkill. A book is a major project, but there are many paths to a finished single-author book manuscript, and not that many dependencies.

17

I have a preference for a healthy combination of both task and project level management. I recognize the distinctions, and use the tool best designed for each approach. Even as I create projects in OF as an assembly of tasks, I do not try to do project management in OF. If I tried to replicate what I can do in Curio for project management, my OF database would become overwhelmed, cluttered, and frustratingly unusable. Correspondingly, I do not do task management in Curio. If I tried to replicate what I can do exceptionally well in OF with task management, my Curio projects would become overwhelmed, cluttered, and frustratingly unusable.

FWIW, other than single action tasks, when I create a project in OF, I consistently put at least three tasks, one in each sequential category: Initiate, ActOn, and Complete. The first says, consider what you want to do and schedule when you will do it. The second says, assemble what you need, do the work, and tidy up afterwards. The final says, file, report, and close the work. I’ve found otherwise, without this “project level” mindset in OF, I tended to create a meandering clutter of tasks. So, I am “outcome” directed in OF, as you noted. Being outcome directed in setting up a project is doing the lower level work in proper project creation, not doing the higher level work in project management.

–
JJW

1 Like