THE PARISH ARCHIVE ================== The parish archive keeps the documents of your parish on parishrecordkeeper.com, where the whole team can reach them: the minutes of the parish council and of the finance council, pictures of the parish's events, letters, reports. It is part of your workspace and costs nothing extra. Open it with CONTROL PANEL -> SERVER ACTIONS -> PARISH ARCHIVE. The button shows how many uploads are waiting to be sorted, for example "PARISH ARCHIVE (3 NEW)". PLEASE READ THIS FIRST: THE SERVER IS NOT YOUR BACKUP ----------------------------------------------------- The archive on the server is there for the CONVENIENCE of your team - so that a member in an outstation can read the minutes, or send in the photographs of a confirmation. It is not a backup, and Parish Record Keeper does not guarantee that the files on the server are preserved. A file deleted by mistake is gone after 14 days; a workspace that is closed takes its archive with it. Keep your own copy. The button COPY THE ARCHIVE TO THIS COMPUTER (bottom right of the window) copies the whole archive into a folder on your computer - see "YOUR OWN COPY" below. An administrator should press it regularly; the window turns the line beside it red when the copy is out of date or has never been made. THE WINDOW ---------- At the top: who you are signed in as, how much of the archive's space is used, and how many files wait in "recent_uploads". On the left: the FOLDERS. A new archive has three: recent_uploads where the team's uploads arrive, waiting to be sorted Council minutes Finance minutes Administrators can create more folders (Pictures, Letters from the diocese, Pastoral council...), rename them and delete them. "recent_uploads" always stays; it cannot be renamed or deleted. The last line, BIN, holds the deleted files for 14 days. On the right: the FILES in the folder you clicked, newest first, with who uploaded each one and when. Tick several files at once with CTRL or SHIFT, as in Windows Explorer. Double-click a file to open it. WHO CAN DO WHAT --------------- Action Member Administrator ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ See every folder and file yes yes Open or download any file yes yes Copy the archive to this computer yes yes Upload files into recent_uploads into any folder Delete a file own uploads, while any file still in recent_uploads Move files into another folder - yes Rename files - yes Create, rename, delete folders - yes Restore from the bin, empty the bin - yes Why can members upload only into "recent_uploads"? Because a document put into the wrong folder is as good as lost: nobody looks for the finance minutes among the pictures. So everything the team sends arrives in one place, and an administrator - who knows the archive - puts each file where it belongs. The server keeps this rule by itself, whatever the window shows. UPLOADING --------- Press UPLOAD FILES..., choose one file or several, and they are sent one after the other. You may type a NOTE first (for example "Photos of the Easter vigil, St Mary outstation"); it goes with every file of that upload and helps the administrator sort them. An administrator's upload goes into the folder that is open on the left; a member's always goes into "recent_uploads". WHAT THE ARCHIVE TAKES: documents (pdf, doc, docx, xls, xlsx, ppt, pptx, odt, ods, odp, rtf, txt, csv), pictures (jpg, jpeg, png, gif, bmp, tif, tiff, heic, heif, webp), sound (mp3, m4a, wav, ogg, opus, amr, aac), videos (mp4, mov, m4v, 3gp, webm, avi, wmv) and zip files. Programs and web pages are refused. HOW BIG: one file may be at most 25 MB - videos too. A long video is usually far bigger; sending it once through WhatsApp, or recording at a lower quality, makes it small enough. THE SAME FILE TWICE is refused: the window says where the archive already has it. A file of the same NAME but different content is kept, with " (2)" added to its name. SORTING "recent_uploads" (administrators) ----------------------------------------- Click "recent_uploads", tick the files that belong together, choose the folder in the MOVE TO box and press MOVE. Moving costs nothing and takes a moment: no file is sent again. RENAME... gives a file a clearer name ("Minutes 2026-09-14 parish council.pdf"); its kind (.pdf, .jpg) stays as it is. A file nobody needs can be deleted instead - into the bin. DELETING AND THE BIN -------------------- DELETE SELECTED moves files into the BIN. They stay there for 14 days, and in that time an administrator can click BIN, tick them and press RESTORE: they go back into their folder (into "recent_uploads" if their folder has been deleted meanwhile). After 14 days they are removed from the server for good. An administrator can also empty the bin at once, with REMOVE FOR GOOD - only for files that are safely kept somewhere else, because it cannot be undone. A folder can be deleted only when it is empty. HOW MUCH SPACE THERE IS ----------------------- The archive of a workspace has 500 MB - room for thousands of pages of minutes, or several hundred photographs. The top of the window shows how much is used; it turns red at 80 %. the whole archive 500 MB (the bin counts too, until its files are removed) waiting in recent_uploads 100 MB (so that unsorted uploads cannot fill everything) one file 25 MB When the archive is full, an upload is refused before anything is sent. An administrator makes room by deleting files - after making sure they are in the copy on the computer - and, if it cannot wait 14 days, by removing them from the bin for good. YOUR OWN COPY ------------- COPY THE ARCHIVE TO THIS COMPUTER downloads the whole archive into a folder on this computer, one sub-folder for each folder of the archive. The first time, you choose where: a folder called "Parish Archive - " is made inside the one you pick. CHOOSE FOLDER... changes it later; OPEN FOLDER shows it in Windows Explorer. TIP: choose a place inside OneDrive, Google Drive or Dropbox. The archive is then kept three times - on the server, on this computer, and in your own cloud storage, which does not depend on parishrecordkeeper.com at all. Press the button again whenever you like. Each time, only what is new is downloaded, and: - a file an administrator has moved to another folder, or renamed, is moved or renamed in your copy too - it is not downloaded again; - a file deleted on the server is NEVER deleted from your copy. Your copy only grows: it is yours, and it is exactly what protects you if something on the server is lost; - a file of your own that happens to have the same name is never overwritten; the archive's file comes in beside it with " (2)". The folder holds one extra file, _prk_archive_index.txt, in which the program notes which of your files is which file on the server. Leave it where it is; if it is deleted, the next copy simply checks each file again. Every member can make a copy. It matters most for the administrators. DOWNLOADING A FEW FILES ----------------------- DOWNLOAD SELECTED... puts the ticked files into a folder you choose; OPEN (or a double-click) fetches one file and opens it straight away, for reading. IF SOMETHING DOES NOT WORK -------------------------- - "The server is not ready for the parish archive yet": the website has not been brought up to date; please tell the developer. - A slow connection: large files take a while. CANCEL stops at once: the file that was on its way is thrown away - nothing half-sent is ever kept - and the files already sent stay in the archive. - A button is greyed out: it is reserved for an administrator, or it needs a file ticked first.