Deleting and Archiving Documents

As discussed in Mailbox Maintenance, you should perform regular mailbox maintenance that includes archiving legacy documents and deleting those no longer needed for historical reference purposes.

Archiving Documents

The most efficient way to archive documents is through Athena's auto-archive feature. Discussed in detail in Auto-Archiving Documents, auto-archiving intervals are set up from Athena's preferences. Archived documents are stored in Athena's built-in Archive folder, and remain accessible indefinitely from the Athena interface. In addition to automated archiving, you can also manually archive documents by right-clicking on a document or group of documents and selecting "Archive" from the context menu that appears.

Deleting Documents

To keep your Athena database as streamlined as possible, you should regularly delete documents that have no historical value. There are several ways to delete documents in Athena:

You can delete a single open document by clicking the Delete button at the top of the document.
You can delete one or more documents from the folder display view by highlighting a document or group of documents and clicking the Delete button at the top of the folder display.
You can delete the entire contents of a folder by right-clicking the folder from the folder tree and selecting "Empty" from the context menu that appears.
You can set up auto-delete intervals to purge old draft documents that have never been sent, as discussed in Auto-Deleting Draft Documents.

With the exception of the auto-delete method listed above, deleting a document merely moves it to the Trash folder. Deleted documents are stored in the Trash folder until you either delete them singly or empty the contents of the Trash folder. Flagged documents cannot be removed from the Trash folder until their flags have been removed. For more information on flagged documents, see Flagging Documents.

If you determine that you have wrongly moved a document to the Trash folder, you have one or more options, depending on your folder view. If Athena is dynamically controlling your folder tree, then you must "restore" the document to the folder it was deleted from by right-clicking the document and selecting "Restore" from the context menu that appears. If your folder view is the classic folder view without document grouping turned on, you also have the option of dragging the deleted document to another folder. For more information on folder views, see Folder Views.

Note: As discussed in Generating Reports, permanently deleted documents are available for viewing and restaging in report results for 3-6 months after being removed from the Trash folder.