[Chris]

So I read Brian's note, went to "Move Old Data to Archive..." on my Mac and saw this: "You should always archive on the same computer. This ensures that you will have a single archive file containing all of your historical data." I'm at home, so I was immediately confronted with the question "Do I want this archive on my home machine or my work machine? Which would be better? Where am I more likely to want to access the archive?"

Then I thought "Why do I even need to worry about this? I sync to a webdav server. Why can't I keep my archive there and avoid this decision completely? Why should the user have to worry about this at all? It's certainly not helping me Get Things Done!!!"

Then I thought, why not just keep a master database on the server I'm syncing to that holds all my actions (archived or not). Then only sync to the clients the ones not flagged as archival and all the client databases will be small (especially if there's an auto-archive preference). The user wouldn't have to worry about which machine the archive is on and could access the archive from anywhere. That was the idea for the thought added in the edit.

In the end, the existence of this thread (combined with the slow start up times for OF on my iPhone) says to me that something's broken with the current archiving and syncing paradigms.