Automatically moving records older than one year

[Hal_Atkins]

I’m wondering about a strategy to help us manage our Airtable base. We have one table (Pets) that now has around 25,000 records from the past 3+ years. As that table is getting rather large, we’d like to come up with a way to keep that table a bit smaller and more nimble - basically, move records that are more than one year old over to a new table (we’ll call that Archived Pets).

Guessing that there are a few parts to this strategy….

1) Set up the new table (Archived Pets) in our base that will have all of the same fields as the current table (Pets). Any easy way to do that?
2) The first move of all the pets that are currently in Pets that are older than one year
3) Setting up the automation that would check every day for pets that are older than one year, and then move those records over to the Archived Pets table

Any help on how to do this - or is there a better way?

[ScottWorld]

You probably already know this, but you can always just setup filtered views to only show you the “active” pets that you want to see. No additional table necessary. 

However, if you are pushing up against Airtable’s record limits of 50,000 records per base on the Pro Plan, you can definitely do automated archiving with scripting or external tools, but you ideally won’t want to do this in a different table in the same base, because you will still hit up against Airtable’s record limits.

You could do this in a new base (which will also eventually hit up against those limits), so you could have multiple bases for different years.

Alternatively, many of my clients setup archives to a Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, because they don’t have row limits. This would be the easier option, because you wouldn’t need to manually create new bases when your old bases fill up, and you wouldn’t need to reconfigure all of your automations. 

In either case, the archiving process can be fully automated by using Make. It will take you a few hours to set this up, and there can be a bit of a learning curve with Make. This is why I created this basic navigation video for Make, along with providing the link to Make’s free training courses.

And if you have a budget for your project and you’d like to hire an expert Airtable consultant to help you create this, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consulting — ScottWorld