Hi everyone. In this video we're gonna look at archiving certain parts of a design file. Let's say you want to delete components or delete pages 'cause they're not used anymore, but you wanna be able to go back just in case. The big thing to remember is if you are on a free plan or if your file is in drafts, it doesn't matter. There is only 30 days of kind of history and saving. Even with these archive versions, you need a paid or organizational enterprise plan and these archive versions will hang around forever.
Basically we're gonna leverage the version history, lemme show you how it works. Okay? So archiving, uh, old work, there's no like official uh, archiving section. Basically we're gonna utilize what we know about the version history, but there's a good practice to follow to make sure it's easy to go back and feel confident when you, especially when you're deleting stuff from files. Okay, let's say that we've moved most of our components or everything we need out to a separate file. So I've got this page here that I do not need.
Okay, so I'm gonna right click it and I'm gonna delete the page and freak out 'cause I'm like, what if there's something in there? So what I'm gonna do is save a version history. Remember a shortcut, command option S or Ctrl Alt S on a pc and let's call this one archive, okay? Achieve anyway, archive. Okay? Uh, and we're gonna put the date.
So we're gonna put in May. We're gonna put it in the 3rd of May. What was changed? Okay, this will be handy for future Dan. So we're gonna say, uh, deleted the actually speed through this. Okay, we'll add some documentation.
The cool thing about that is that now I can say, now delete, it's gone. Can go about my work. Keep working, keep working. Know that it's there. Okay? I can go back to my version history, okay?
And say, look, even though I've done stuff, I can go back here. How do I go back here? I can click on it and I can go to the little dots. I can click on it actually and just work my way around. You'll see that the component's page is back. So I can go through and just review it while we're in this mode.
Remember, okay, we can zoom and look and check, but we can't copy and paste anything out. We can't manipulate stuff. If you want to do that, you can either do restore to this version, grab the stuff you want, and then jump back to the current version. Or you might want to separate it out and duplicate it so you've got another separate file or create another Figma file a copy, okay? And we can rename this now something more appropriate. I'm gonna leave it messing up my drafts folder, okay?
And when you're finished, let's click done. So I can always go back there to make it even handier. Let's jump back to our version history. Now, if you have version history, you have to have nothing selected, then go to the little Chevron. Okay? What you can do to be a bit more professional is you can click on it, click on the little dots and say copy link.
Okay? And then we can create a change log. Hit done. Okay? We're gonna create a new page. So I just quickly whip this up.
Uh, cover page and here are my archive versions. Okay? Now there's one little bug with this check. It works Now. 'cause what would be really handy is to go, all right, today is this. I'm gonna select to the text, I'm gonna add a hyperlink.
I'm gonna paste in that, but that doesn't seem to work. Like you can click on it for sure, but it does it, it links to the same page. It just has problems at the moment. So at the moment the workaround is, it's just to paste it as a URL, which is not beautiful, okay? 'cause that is not, not a beautiful file name, but people can copy and paste it out. I'm gonna make it quite small and we might have to add some notes there of like copy and paste this to go back to this archive.
Check that they haven't fixed it though. You can even see by default that it's made it a clickable link, which isn't still good. Okay, so I'm gonna break the link to it. Actually hit that link there. Break it. So it's just text so people can't click on it.
Hopefully that'll update where you can actually click on it and it'll actually go to an archive version. But I can copy and paste it either in view mode or in design mode, paste it into a browser and you will see it's gone back to this archive version and people can go and decide whether they wanna restore this version or duplicate it. There you go. That is how to archive stuff. And be careful it doesn't disappear forever. Just give it a name.
That's really all you need to do. You can be a bit fancier by grabbing that link, putting to its own page. There you go. That is archiving your work without having a panic attack.