archive

Archive Operations

Purpose

Query historical Switchboard plans that are no longer on the hot kanban board.

Which archive am I looking at?

There are two stores, and they are not interchangeable. Pick by the path you were given, not by habit.

Store	Path	CLI	When it exists
Cold store (default, what the board uses)	<workspaceRoot>/.switchboard/kanban-archive.db	sqlite3	Whenever plans have aged out of the hot board
Legacy DuckDB archive (opt-in)	value of the switchboard.archive.dbPath setting	duckdb	Only if the user configured that setting

Default to the cold store. The Project panel's ARCHIVES tab reads it, and the QUERY ARCHIVES button hands you its absolute path. The DuckDB archive only exists for users who explicitly set switchboard.archive.dbPath; if that setting is empty, there is no DuckDB file and duckdb commands will fail (or, worse, silently create an empty database).

Guardrails

• Read-only. Always. Never INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, DROP, ATTACH, or COPY against either archive. Archiving and restoration are the extension's job.
• Never invent the path. Use the path you were given. sqlite3 silently creates an empty database when handed a path that does not exist, so a typo or a wrong working directory leaves a stray 0-byte file behind and returns zero rows that look like a legitimate empty result.
• Guard before querying:

ARCHIVE_DB="<path you were given>"
[ -f "$ARCHIVE_DB" ] || { echo "No archive at $ARCHIVE_DB — nothing has been archived yet."; exit 1; }

Cold store: status is 'completed', not 'archived'

This is the single most common way to get a wrong answer here. Archived rows carry status = 'completed'; the V10 migration rewrites any historical status = 'archived' row to 'completed'. A query filtering on 'archived' returns zero rows on a fully-populated archive — an empty result with no error.

-- CORRECT
SELECT topic, kanban_column, updated_at FROM plans WHERE status = 'completed';

-- WRONG — always returns nothing
SELECT topic FROM plans WHERE status = 'archived';