Best practice for archives and semi-archives

The following is an instance of a recurring type of problem. So I need to find a systemic rather than a particular solution.

I receive weekly tracking reports. When I search for “tracking report” I get hundreds of hits. Most are visual clutter. Those from the last 12 months need to be readily available. Those older than 3 years need to be kept, just in case, but will almost certainly never be opened again. Those from 1-3 years old are needed rarely enough that I would prefer for them not to appear in routine searching, but are needed frequently enough that I don’t want to have to do digital archaeology to find them. This raises two questions.

  1. What is the best practice for files that you truly wish to retire and archive? Do they go into a directory not indexed by EF? Do they go into a separate EF database? Is there some better way?

  2. What is the best practice for semi-archived files, which you don’t wish to see in the instant search results, but which you do wish to be able to find within a minute or two, should the need arise?

Thanks.

I don’t think there are necessarily “right” answers to these questions. There are many possible strategies involving multiple libraries, folders, smart folders, and tags. Which is most convenient will probably depend on the particulars of your files and how you work.

I would probably move them to a separate EagleFiler library. The advantage there would be that you could still browse and search them if you needed to, but you wouldn’t have to do any work to prevent them from showing up in the course of your normal work.

If the date is the only deciding factor, one option would be to create a smart folder to show all the current files. Then if you click on the smart folder first, when you do a search it will automatically exclude all the older files.

Or if you organize the files into (regular) folders by date, you could scope your search by clicking on the appropriate folder. You might have a folder of “current” files and then an Archive folder with subfolders for each year or month.

Thanks. That all makes sense. I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t overlooking a feature. This is requiring some neural re-wiring, but I think I like where it’s headed.