Archiving & Restoring Goats
Archiving hides a goat from your main herd view while keeping every record intact. It's reversible, and it's the safe alternative to deleting.
How to Archive
Archiving isn't done through the Status dropdown — it has its own flow:
Herd tab → 📦 Archive Goats
Select the goats you want to archive and confirm. You can archive several at once, which is the usual case — a batch of animals that left the farm last season.
The archive option also appears when you're over the free plan's goat limit, as an alternative to upgrading.
Restoring
Archived goats appear in their own section on the Herd tab. Open it, select who you want back, and restore — they return to Active status with everything intact.
You can restore individually or all at once.
Archiving vs. Status
Both hide a goat from day-to-day views, but they answer different questions:
| Use | When |
|---|---|
| Sold / Deceased / Retired status | You know what happened to the animal — record it accurately |
| External Reference status | A pedigree ancestor you never owned |
| Archive | You just don't want to see them in the list any more |
Recording an accurate status is better documentation. Archiving is housekeeping. A goat that was sold should be marked Sold — you keep the buyer, price, and date, and she still won't count toward your limit.
Archive is for tidying: old animals whose disposition is already recorded, or trimming an active list that's grown unwieldy.
Archived Goats and the Free Plan
Archived goats don't count toward the free plan's 10-goat limit — same as Sold, Deceased, Retired, and External. See Free vs Unlimited.
Archiving vs. Deleting
Deleting a goat removes her associated records too — health, milk, breeding, weights — and none of it can be recovered. It also breaks her out of her offspring's pedigrees.
Archive instead. There is almost no situation where deleting is the right answer for a real animal; it's for duplicates and genuine data-entry mistakes.
If you're clearing out a mis-entered goat, export a backup first. It costs a minute and it's the only undo that exists.