Archiving old runs
Runs accumulate. A team that starts a run every weekday has a Runs page nobody can read within a couple of months, and a dashboard showing work that stopped mattering long ago. Archiving old runs clears the view without losing anything.
Why archive rather than delete
Archiving takes a run out of your active views but keeps it, so it stays in the archived runs reports and in the account history. Deleting removes it from reporting as well. For housekeeping you want archiving every time. See How to delete or archive a workflow run for the full difference.
What to archive
Work through the Runs page and look for:
- Runs that were completed a while ago and are no longer referred to.
- Runs that were abandoned, started and then overtaken by events. These are the ones that distort your reporting, because they sit in progress forever and make completion rates look worse than they are.
- Test runs from when the workflow was being built.
Filter the Runs page by workflow, by tag or by date before you start, so you are looking at one group at a time rather than everything at once. See Using the Runs list page.
A habit rather than a project
Archiving is much less work as a monthly ten-minute pass than as an annual clear-out. If runs pile up faster than anyone can archive them, that is usually a sign the workflow is being run more often than it needs to be, or that runs are being started and never closed. Both are worth looking at directly.
Video walkthrough
This video walks through archiving old runs.