Starring, archiving and deleting

Three controls, in the ⋯ menu on a project card and in the project-name dropdown on the project page. They are not variations of the same thing.

	Star	Archive	Delete
Reversible	Yes	No, not from the product	No
Keeps your files	Yes	Yes	No
Keeps the chat and history	Yes	Yes	No
Stops the sandbox	No	Yes	Yes, and destroys it
Visible on the dashboard afterwards	Yes	No	No
Affects a published site	No	No	Unpublishes it

Starring

A flag, nothing more. A starred project:

• appears under the dashboard's Starred tab,
• shows a filled amber star on its card even when you are not hovering,
• shows a star beside its name in the project page's top bar.

Toggle it from the card's star button, from the ⋯ menu, or from the project-name dropdown. The change is instant; if it fails you get Could not update the star and the page reloads.

Stars are per project, not per person — starring a project stars it for everyone in the organization.

Archiving

Archiving is for a project you have finished with but do not want to destroy.

What happens:

1. The sandbox is stopped. The development server is shut down. Locally the process is killed; in the cloud the sandbox is stopped, not deleted.
2. The project's status becomes archived.
3. Everything else is kept — every file, every message, every build run, all of version history.

From the project page, the confirmation reads:

Archive "<name>"? The sandbox is stopped and the project moves out of your dashboard views. You can delete it there later.

Afterwards you land back on the dashboard.

The thing to know before you archive

There is no way to unarchive a project from inside Bookbag, and archived projects appear in none of the dashboard's four tabs, in the sidebar, or in the ⌘K search. The confirmation's promise that "you can delete it there later" does not hold — there is no "there" that lists them.

Archiving is therefore closer to a soft delete than to a filing cabinet. The data is genuinely safe and a platform administrator can see the archived count in the admin overview, but as a user you cannot get the project back.

If you might want the project again, download its source first, or simply leave it where it is. Projects cost nothing to keep, and a stopped sandbox costs nothing to keep either.

Starting a build on an archived project is refused with "This project is archived — restore it first."

Deleting

Permanent and complete.

The confirmation, in red:

Delete "<name>"? The app, its sandbox and its whole build history are removed permanently.

What is removed, in order:

1. The sandbox is destroyed. Locally the project folder is deleted from disk; in the cloud the sandbox itself is removed.
2. The published site is taken offline, if the project had one. The address is released and another project could later claim it.
3. Every chat message.
4. Every version history record — every file's before and after.
5. Every build run and its steps.
6. The whole model-visible transcript.
7. The project row itself.

None of it is recoverable. There is no bin and no undo.

One refusal

A build is still running — wait for it to finish first.

Deletion is refused while a run is running or queued. Cancel the run from the chat, or wait for it.

Who can do these

All three are writes. The project's creator, and owners, admins and members of its organization, can do all of them. Viewers can do none of them. The controls are still rendered for a viewer; clicking one returns "You can view this project but not change it."

What to do instead

"I am done with this project." Download the source, then delete it. That is the honest version of archiving, and it leaves you with the app.

"I might come back to this." Leave it alone. Unstar it so it stops crowding your Starred tab. Projects do not expire.

"I want it off the internet but not gone." Do not archive it — that does not unpublish anything. Open the Publish dialog and press Take offline. The address stays reserved to the project. See Managing a published app.

Next

• What a build run is.