Archiving and deleting

Two different ideas, and it’s worth keeping them apart.

Archiving

Archiving marks something as finished-and-filed. It stays in your vault, stays searchable, and stays linkable — it just stops showing up in the lists you look at day to day.

Use it for the completed project you might want to refer back to, the old client, the year that’s over.

The sidebar has an Archived entry showing everything archived, so it’s one click away rather than gone.

To archive a single note or file, right-click it (or use its ⋯ menu) and choose Archive. To archive a whole folder, such as a finished project, right-click the folder and choose Archive folder. Everything inside goes in one step, subfolders included, and the folder leaves your sidebar. Archived files keep their folder path, so Unarchive on any of them puts it back exactly where it was.

Tip

Archiving is usually the right move for finished work. Deleting is for things that were never worth keeping — a duplicate, a mistake, a test note.

The Trash

Deleting moves a note to Pellet’s Trash, listed at the bottom of the sidebar. Nothing is destroyed at that point — open the Trash and restore anything.

Deleting without being asked

By default Pellet asks before moving anything to the Trash. To stop the question, tick Don’t ask again in it, or set Settings › General › Ask before moving to Trash to Never. Choose Always there to bring it back. With Device sync on, the setting follows you to your other devices.

Some deletes always ask, whatever the setting: deleting permanently and emptying the Trash, because they can’t be undone, and the questions about a document’s highlight notes, a note’s attachments, or which occurrences of a repeating task to delete.

Deleting a note with attachments

If the note links images or PDFs, Pellet asks about them before anything moves. The dialog lists each attachment and says whether another document still uses it: not used elsewhere, or also used by one or more other documents, with a warning that names them.

Tick Move the attachments to the trash as well to send them to the Trash with the note. Leaving them alone is the default. Ticking it moves every attachment in the list, including ones another document uses, so read the list first. Anything moved can be restored from the Trash.

Emptying the Trash is the point of no return. After that only your own backups can bring something back.

What deleting a repeating task means

If a task repeats, deleting asks what you actually mean, the way a calendar app does. Three choices:

• This occurrence — skip this one; the series carries on.
• This and following — end the series here; the occurrences already recorded are kept.
• All occurrences — delete the series and every recorded occurrence.

Choosing wrongly is easy, so it asks rather than guessing.

Sync never deletes for you

If you sync between devices, a conflict never resolves by throwing one version away — both are kept, and the loser becomes a clearly-named copy. Deletion is something you do, not something that happens to you.