Archiving finished tasks

Finished tasks pile up. Archiving clears them off your Maintenance list without losing them from your reports, and closing a period frees the storage their photos take once you no longer need them.

Both are done by owners and managers. An owner can give the right to other roles, or take it away from managers, under Settings → Roles & permissions → Archive finished tasks.

Archived tasks

A task is archived automatically 14 days after it is marked complete. Archiving takes it off the Maintenance list and the map, and nothing else changes: its photos, notes, discussion and logged hours all stay, and it still counts in the annual report, the week and month overview and everything else that adds up your work.

To archive a completed task straight away, open it and press Archive. To archive every completed task at once, open Maintenance → Archive and press Archive completed tasks now.

To see archived tasks, open the filters on the Maintenance page and pick Archived under List. Open one and press Unarchive to put it back on the list. Reopening an archived task also puts it back, because it is work to do again.

90 days after a task is completed, its full-size photos are replaced with smaller copies, sized to look sharp on a phone or laptop screen. That frees most of the space photos take while the task keeps its pictures.

Closing a period

When a season or a year is behind you, close it. Closing a period permanently removes the photos, map snapshots and discussions of every task completed in it. The tasks themselves stay, with their title, notes, type, trail, dates and logged hours, so every report still counts them, including a custom range that runs across the closed period.

1. Open Maintenance → Archive.
2. Under Close a period, pick the start and end dates, or press All of last year. The period has to end before today.
3. Press Preview. You see how many completed tasks, photos and discussion messages are in the period, and how much storage closing it frees.
4. If you want to keep the pictures, press Download the photos first. You get a ZIP with a folder per task.
5. Type CLOSE and press Close this period.

Only completed tasks are affected. Open and in-progress tasks are never touched, however old they are. Completed tasks in the period that were not archived yet are archived as part of closing it.

Closing a period cannot be undone. A closed task opens as usual and says that its photos and discussion were removed when the period was closed.

The saved report

When you close a period, its annual report is saved exactly as it reads that day. Find it under Closed periods on the Archive page and press View report. It has the same pages and the same Download PDF as the live annual report, and it keeps the names of trails even if they are renamed or removed later.

The live annual report keeps counting the closed tasks too, so the two agree unless something about the period changes later, such as hours approved after you closed it.