(Archived) Some feature ideas for discussion

[RedUK 0]

OK, from my own use over the last week or 2 I have some ideas - be interested to hear if anyone else would find them useful.

1. 'Archive' an old Notebook

My role has be managing lots of different projects, and sometimes programmes. When these activities are current, I want access to my notes all the time, so a programme is a synchronized notebook, with each project within it getting its own tag. When the programme or large project ends I'd like to be able to mark it as archived, so that I have my store of notes should I ever revisit the project or if similar work comes up again, but I'd like it to not appear in my main interface (on any client)

2. 'Archive' old tags

In the scenario above I may have had a whole tree of tags that were very project specific - I'd like to be able to archive those for the same reason : get them out of the interface but not break the associations if I need to un-archive the associated notes

[RedUK 0]

ok thinking about this further I suppose we'd need to tie the Notebook with a group of notebook-specific tags so that archiving or unarchiving affects it all together.

So I think I am suggesting:

i - Notebook specific tags : for each notebook the ability to set up a group or nested collection of tags that will only be applicable to that notebook

(For me this would be great - many of my projects have very project-specific content that I would want to tag - eg technical info or delivery phases. Once the project is done then the tags, and many of the notes, while nice to have for future reference are no longer 'current' and I don't need to be able to see them)

ii - Archive - set a notebook (and it's notebook-specific tags) to 'archive' status.

I'm not sure where the best place to store this is - in the computer client ? Not everyone would be using one, so probably online. An archived notebook would not be visible in the mobile client (maybe a tab or option to show a list of you specifically want to?). Ability to restore to current status, at which point if the notebook used to publish and/or sync then this was enabled again too, and the archived tags associated become available again too.

If it's not clear to others, the reason i suggest this is that otherwise as I delver projects I am left with an increasingly long list of Tags which were specific to old, delivered projects

[engberg 89]

To archive a set of notes into "cold storage", you can select those notes (or the whole notebook) and then use the Export operation to export those to a file on your computer. You can import that later into the Mac or Windows desktop client.

[RedUK 0]

Thanks I hadn't considered that option.

If I do that, then delete the Notebook from my account, and also delete any no-longer used Tags, when I later import the Notebook will the necessary tags get recreated, or will the tags on the notes be lost because I deleted the tags. (I hope that makes sense...)

[engberg 89]

Tags are optional for exported notes. I.e. you can choose whether to include them when you export your notes, and then you can choose whether to apply them when you import notes.

[RedUK 0]

what I mean is

actually never mind I'll test it

[RedUK 0]

OK yes, if you :

1. Export the notebook (with tags)

2. Delete the notebook from Evernote

3. Delete any now redundant Tags

4. Synchronize so that it's gone from the cloud/everywhere.

5. Import the old notebook

then the act of importing re-creates the Tags (although any previous Tag nesting hierarchy is gone - not really a problem) which is what I was wondering.

so this achieves what I need it to.

I still think it would be nice to be able to online-archive to the online Evernote account rather than rely on having the exported file stuck in a single location, but you're right this does what I need it to do, thanks.

[mrtim 16]

Hmmm, I've been looking for a "Project Archive" type of function that I could use to bundle all the notes for a completed project and "retire" any tags related to the project. What I'm now realizing will work is to export all the related notes with their tags to a file, and then attach that file to a single new note that will represent the archive. So now the data is all there, in Evernote, and I can restore it pretty easily if I want to. Sweet!

Maybe the import/export functions could be enhanced to work with an .xml file attached to a note, but other than that I think I'm set.