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Archiving ends a session and releases its pod and persistent volume, but keeps the session record and its message history so you can find it later. Use archiving as the default cleanup path — reserve permanent deletion for sessions whose data must be removed.

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When to archive

  • You’re done with a session and want to reclaim its cluster resources.
  • You want to tidy up your sidebar without losing the record of what happened.
  • You’ll never restart the session, but you may still want to reference the conversation.
If the session data must be permanently removed (for example, to satisfy a data retention policy), an admin can delete it instead.

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Who can archive

  • You can archive any session you own.
  • Admins can archive or delete any session in the organization.
Deleting a session is restricted to admins.

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Archive a session

  1. In the sidebar, hover the session and open its menu (the three-dot icon).
  2. Select Archive.
  3. Confirm the action.
The session moves to the Archived status. Its pod is stopped, its persistent volume is packaged into a compressed archive and uploaded to your organization’s S3 bucket (when S3 storage is configured), and its messages are retained in the database.

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Automatic archiving

Admins can configure Cake Agents to automatically archive sessions that have been idle for a set number of days. This keeps the sidebar tidy without anyone having to remember to clean up.
  • The sweep runs on a daily schedule.
  • Only sessions that have been inactive longer than the configured threshold are archived.
  • Starred sessions are always skipped.
  • Sessions already archived or deleted are skipped.

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Configure auto-archiving

This is an organization-wide setting. Only admins can change it.
  1. Go to Settings → Organization → General.
  2. Toggle Automatically archive inactive sessions on.
  3. Set Archive sessions after to the number of days of inactivity to allow (1–365).
  4. Optionally, select Archive now to run the rule immediately instead of waiting for the daily sweep. You’ll be asked to confirm before anything is archived.
Turning the switch off (or setting the value to 0) disables auto-archiving.

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Protect a session from auto-archiving

Star a session to exclude it from automatic archiving. Starred sessions are never touched by the sweep, no matter how long they’ve been idle. Unstar the session when you’re done, and it becomes eligible again on the next sweep.

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Find archived sessions

Use the sidebar filter to show archived sessions:
  1. Select the filter icon at the top of the session list.
  2. Under By Status, select Archived.
You can also filter by Live, Inactive, or All to focus on active work.

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What archiving preserves

Restoring an archived session and viewing archived messages inline are not yet available.

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Storage requirements

Archived session data is uploaded to S3-compatible object storage. If your deployment doesn’t have S3 configured, archiving still ends the session and keeps the message history, but the session’s files won’t be preserved. See S3 storage to configure a bucket.