Behavior of "Move Old Data to Archive..."
 

Jut to be clear, does this functionality archive [B]any[/B] action completed before a date, regardless of its project status?

If possible, I'd prefer to be able to choose between (a) archiving actions just in completed projects and (b) archiving all completed actions regardless of status. I say this because I often find that past actions in my remaining projects are very helpful for me to get some background on what I've done already (and forgot).

In addition, I think it'd be handy for me to be able to archive a project on an individual level (such as during my weekly review). This is especially handy in the case of which I have some old completed actions that I don't want blown away (see above) sitting along recently completed actions that are just being noise.

I agree. It would be good to have an option to "not archive" some projects. For example, I have notes on some completed projects. For now, I'll put the key notes in the project note field instead of individual actions.

I agree as well. Although, it's pretty easy to just open your archive and see the info there as well (File -> Open Archive).

One other problem that I've already reported is that repeating projects that have some completed actions that get archived will end up missing those actions once you actually complete the project and it repeats. Fortunately, you can just open the archive and drag the old completed actions back to your main database to correct the problem.

I wonder if maybe projects that are set to repeat should not have their actions archived until after the entire project has been completed and it has produced a new repetition.

-Dennis

Is the Archive a 1.1 feature? I have 1.0.2 and I don't see it under my File menu. Also, is there any documentation/explanation about what the Archive feature does? Could you point me in the right direction? It sounds intriguing since I am starting to get a bunch of completed projects in my OF database.

Thanks,
Eric

It is a 1.1 feature whose rationale is described in the 1.1 release notes. You can grab the sneakypeeks if you want details.

Archiving is a 1.1 feature. As Dennis notes, archiving is still a work in progress. The interaction of repeating items with syncing and archiving seems to be the roughest patch in the 1.1 sneaky peeks.

Judging from this:

In OmniFocus 1.1, we added a new "Archive Old Data..." item under the File menu. It will move older actions over to a separate database file that isn't synced with your phone. This way, you have access to your older actions when you need to refer to them back on your desktop, but your phone doesn't run out of memory.

In general, we'd recommend trying to keep the number of actions on your phone down below a thousand.

.....

It seems Archive Old Data was developed to make OF iPhone life better. I'd prefer that there be a setting that says "Don't sync stuff with OF iPhone older than...". That way, my desktop environment is untouched and things are made small enough for OF iPhone to work.

I archived my stuff this morning and I've already run into "missing completed" items in my search to figure out what happened in the past. Not a desirable side effect to being forced to size my database for OF iPhone performance problems.

[QUOTE=blewis;40699]
I archived my stuff this morning and I've already run into "missing completed" items in my search to figure out what happened in the past. Not a desirable side effect to being forced to size my database for OF iPhone performance problems.[/QUOTE]

To make things worse, I archived on my "home" account. Now I am @work, using my "work" account and I can't access my Archived Data from my work account since it was archived using my home account.

So far, not the best solution.

If this archival is critical to OF iPhone performance, I would strongly suggest a method to limit the amount of archived/completed data that gets transfered to the iPhone app as opposed to forcing the desktop app user to make inflexible archival decisions.

I'm just guessing here, but I wonder if the *entire* OmniFocus database gets copied to the iPhone even though OmniFocus for iPhone only displays a subset of the data (e.g. no "on hold" actions, etc.).

The thing that make me think that is OmniFocus for iPhone seems to be aware of the number of remaining actions in the Project view, including actions that are in "on hold" projects, even though it doesn't display all of them when you drill down. Or maybe it just counts them ahead of time and displays the totals in Project view?

If, for whatever reason, the entire database does need to be sent to the phone, then a separate archive database makes a lot of sense to keep the size of your main database at a reasonable level.

-Dennis