A recent post has made me think about archiving and the way it works currently and I think it could be improved. The request obviously is in a way that would benefit us, not sure about how everyone else does it but I would hope it would benefit a lot of others too.

To put it as simply as possible, the way I am currently archiving is at the end of the year, i use a custom built SQL function to move all jobs with a due date of the year just passed and move them into an archive folder with that year as the main category.

I do this instead of exporting as it is almost daily we have to match previous orders which can sometimes be from multiple years ago so i need quick and easy access to them rather than having to export everything and then re-import them every time we need them and then clutter the project tree.

Of course the cost of this is a larger database and I imagine slower load times. As it stands our database is about 57gb, not sure how it compares to others.

How to improve it, i'm not sure but one thought I had would be somehow run a seperate database side by side as an archived database where we could put all the archived projects, speed up the main database but still have easy access to open archived projects and ability to copy them.

A tool to move projects in one hit so we could do away with the SQL would also be a big help. It's always scary messing around with SQL and obviously not an option for what i assume is the majority of users.

Below is a sample of our project tree