Archiving and deleting

Workspaces accumulate. Archiving is how you clear them out without throwing anything away.

Archiving

Archiving parks a workspace: it leaves the sidebar for Settings › Archive (⌘⇧A), along with its diff stats and whether its pull request merged. Workspaces archived in the last week are grouped by time or by project; anything older sits in a collapsed Older drawer, flat and sorted by date. Every row has Reopen and Delete, and the drawer has a Delete all. Opening an archived workspace shows its conversation read-only, with Reopen where the composer would be.

For a worktree workspace, archiving also reclaims the checkout from disk. That’s the point of it: worktrees are real directories, and a finished one is dead weight. The reclaim is lossless. Before removing the folder, Raven captures everything uncommitted and untracked to a side reference in the repo, so what survives is:

• the branch the worktree was on, with its commits,
• the full conversation,
• and any work in progress that was never committed.

The files Raven carried into the worktree — the .env-style seeds from project setup — are deliberately excluded. They’re config Raven owns, not work, and stashing them would write secrets into the object store and restore stale copies over fresh ones later.

Before going ahead, Raven lists what you’d be leaving behind: You have uncommitted changes (they’re stashed and come back when you reopen) and You have N unmerged commits (they stay on the branch). Archive Anyway proceeds. If the workspace has published design pages, those go offline too and the button reads Archive and unpublish.

Archiving refuses — and offers Delete workspace instead — when the branch the worktree has checked out no longer exists in the repo, or when the project folder itself is gone. A worktree sitting on a detached HEAD can’t be archived either; check out a branch first.

Archiving a local workspace is just bookkeeping. There’s no separate checkout to reclaim, and your project folder is untouched.

Reopening

Reopening a worktree workspace re-creates the checkout — a new worktree on the branch it was archived on, seeds copied, setup command run — and restores the work in progress that was captured on archive. You get back the branch and the uncommitted changes exactly as they were, in a fresh, working copy.

The conversation comes back in full either way. It was never in the worktree; it’s in Raven’s own database.

The 30-day sweep

Archived workspaces don’t stay forever. When Raven launches, anything archived more than 30 days ago is deleted for good — the same path as Delete all, branches and stashed work included; a branch on GitHub with unmerged work is never deleted. The Older drawer says so, and the switch is Settings › General › Archive › Delete archived chats after 30 days, on by default. Reopen anything you want to keep before it ages out.

Deleting

Deleting is permanent, and it means different things for the two kinds of workspace:

• Worktree workspace — the worktree, every local branch that was checked out in it, and anything uncommitted go with it. There’s no undo. A branch that’s also checked out somewhere else stays, and the confirmation says which. The branch on GitHub is deleted only if its work was merged; otherwise it’s kept, and the confirmation says so too. If you’re not certain, archive instead: it costs nothing and keeps everything.
• Local workspace — only the conversation is removed. The files in your project folder stay exactly as they are. Raven never touches your repo root on delete.

Either way, delete also discards what belonged to the workspace and nowhere else: unsaved draft design boards (save them from the Design surface first), the browser’s logins and cookies, and the pictures and clips the agent showed in the chat. Published design pages from the workspace go offline. The confirmation lists all of it.

Teardown commands

If a project needs something torn down before its worktree disappears — a container stopped, a port released — set a teardown command in the project’s settings. It runs in the worktree just before the folder is removed, on archive or delete of a worktree workspace. See Project setup.