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Archive old Chaos Stuff

Those using Time and Chaos or Intellect should consider archiving old tasks, appointments, emails and contacts at the beginning of each year (or every other year).

Archive Tasks and Appointments

Archiving allows you to get the old stuff out of your database without losing it. I normally use January to cleanup tasks and appointments older than 2 years. All this information is retained and can be brought back if needed using the Advanced File explorer.

Choose File Menu and then select Archive. You'll be offered a date two years before today. I changed it to Jan 1, 2014. This will archive all the entries before January 1, 2014, and retain all subsequent tasks and appointments. I check both tasks and appointments. I store the files in a subfolder of Chaos Data called Archives. This way it is automatically backed up with the rest of my data.


After creating the files, I use file explorer to rename the file with the date so it becomes: "Archived-Tasks - before 2012.bak" or "Archived Appointments 2013.bak"

Archive Old Emails

I use Chaos Software's Intellect program which combines the tasks, calendar, contacts and projects with Email. If you do, it might make sense to archive old emails every couple of years.

I never delete emails from clients. I don't like to strain my brain trying to decide whether I might ever need it, so I don't delete any emails except spam or newsletters that I've read and other impersonal stuff. However, every month or so I move emails from my inbox to a saved annual archive folder. So, under saved I have an OLD folder. Within the OLD folder, I have annual folders.

Chaos saves each email as a single .msg file. It also maintains a Mail Cache index of emails so you can do quick searches and find anything anywhere in seconds using Quick Find.

For this reason, Intellect must know what you are doing. So, I close Intellect and then Copy the files to an archive folder. This is how my mail archive folder looks.



Next, I re-open Intellect and using the right click options menu inside Intellect, I delete those 2011 and 2012 folders that I copied from inside the OLD folder. Doing this inside Intellect allows intellect to reindex and maintain the new cache.

If you ever need to restore those emails, you can just:
  • recreate the annual folder under OLD
  • drag and drop the all the emails in the annual folder from File Explorer into Intellect. Intellect will see them and re-index.



Date: January 2017


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This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

 
 
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