I want to create a butler rule for my already archived cards

[Andra Babigian]

I can't figure out how to have Butler create a rule for cards that are already archived. I would like to move all archived cards that were completed in 2019 or earlier to another board.

[Esme Crutchley]

Hi @Andra Babigian 

Unfortunately, there's no way to act on cards that have already been archived.

You could add them all back to the board and then run a single (or 12) Butler command/s that moves all the cards completed in 2019 to another board once they're all on the board, but you can't act on cards that are already archived.

However, there isn't a Butler rule for moving cards when the due date was completed in X year in the Board button. What you could do is create a label called 2019, and apply that to each card that you unarchive, and then act on that label.

If you go along the lines of labels, and you wanted to have a list per month, you could have 2019-01 as a label, or Jan 19, whichever way you prefer to have your dates, then you could act on that label with a board button under 'move' - "move each card with the 'pink January 2019' label into the January 2019 list on board 2019."

Have a Jan, Feb, Mar, etc. button, then move everything back. You'd have to add this label (one of the 12) to each card that you bring back to the board, but you'd only have to do it once. If you order your lists (whichever ones they come back into) by due date, you'll easily be able to see which ones were finished in 2019 and can apply the labels.

To get around this, I used to have an archive list at the end of my board for each month where I put all my completed cards rather than archiving them, then at the end of the month, Butler moved the whole list to another board and created a new one for the current month?

There is also a rule where if you click to archive the card, it automatically unarchives it and moved it somewhere else, which could be useful.

In this case, I would have your secondary board and create a list called "Done", then you can have the rule set to move all cards to "Done" then at 11.55pm on the last day of the month, rename the list to {monthname} {year} and create another list called "Done" - then the rule would work all the time without having to worry that the list names are different. This is exactly how I run mine, so if you'd like to see the Butler rules, I'm more than happy to share!

Sorry I couldn't be more help!

Esme :)