Selecting suitable data to archive

Under normal circumstances, you should only archive data that relates to past activities that are completed - it would not make sense to archive data that is currently being worked on, that is part of an active project, or that is part of a past project on which you still want to be able to report, for example.

You can archive projects, charts and summary groups. When you archive a project, chart or summary group, everything it contains is archived, so if you select a project, chart or summary group that contains subordinate charts or summary groups, the subordinate charts and summary groups are selected for archiving automatically.

You can select the projects, charts and summary groups that you want to archive at any level of the project hierarchy. To illustrate this, examine the hierarchy below, which contains three projects - A, B and C - within a programme. Each project contains a number of charts - A1, A2, A3, A4, B1, etc - and each chart contains a number of summary groups - A1i, A1ii, A1iii, A2i, etc:

A project hierarchy displayed in the project view

Within this hierarchy, you could choose to archive at the following levels:

Project level - if you were to archive project A, all of the charts and summary groups it contains would be archived, but projects B and C would not be archived.
Chart level - if you were to archive charts A1 and A2, all of the summary groups they contain would be archived, but charts A3 and A4 and projects B and C would not be archived.
Summary group level - if you were to archive summary groups A1i and A1ii, all of the tasks they contain would be archived, but summary group A1iii, the charts within project A and projects B and C would not be archived.

You cannot archive any branch of a project that contains an archived chart or summary group. For example, if you had already archived chart A2 in the hierarchy illustrated above, you could not subsequently choose to archive project A. For this reason, it is good practice to archive data at as high a level as possible in the project hierarchy.