If you wish to store applications within your SurveyMonkey Apply site for future reporting, you may do so by archiving these applications. This article discusses how to safely archive applications for future use.
The key difference between the two options is mainly for organizational purposes. In most cases, Archived Applications refer to applications that have gone through most, if not all, of the application process in a previous year or cycle. They allow you to organize that those applications were real applications that passed through your process. Deleted Applications, however, are typically applications that are incomplete, or were used for testing.
For more information in regards to Deleted or Trashed Applications, you can refer to How to Move Applications to Trash.
Archiving applications will keep your report data accurate, applicant portal clean, and application management easy so that you only see new applications.
If an application is archived incorrectly, the action can be reverted. See Restoring Archived Applications below for steps to recover these applications.
To archive an application from Manage Applications:
In order to archive an application automatically in the site:
This example will walk through the setup of an Automation where we want to archive all applications that have been moved to the Ineligible Holding stage in our workflow.
| Source | Event | Target |
| Application | Application has changed stage | Ineligible |
Not Required for this Scenario
| Action Source | Action |
| Application | Archive the Application |
When an application is archived the data that was collected is still accessible to administrators. It can be viewed as an application similar to how an active application is viewed and data from that application can be pulled into reports.
To view all archived applications within your site:
If an application is archived in error, the application can be reactivated ultimately reverting the error. To restore an archived application:
Changes to your workflow may affect archived and trashed applications. For example, if you delete a question from a form, the answers to that question will be deleted from all applications using that form. This would include all active and inactive applications (Archived and Trashed). Additionally, when a task is deleted from your workflow, the information captured by that task will also be deleted from any archived or trashed applications.
For more information, you can also refer to How to Safely Make Changes to a Live Form which details the cautions of what editing a form can do to your existing data.