I think this may be exactly what I was hoping for when I asked about hiding or moving the branch instead. But we may not remember it was hcayless-appcrit as opposed to hughc-critapp. How does one get a list of branches that have been tagged and deleted? Something like 'git list archived/'? And can you ask the question "which archived branches had commits from MrClean more than a month ago?"?
Looks like the best practice is to tag your branch and then delete it. That way it's not cluttering up your list of branches, but you can still get at it if you need to: $ git tag -a archived/hcayless-appcrit $ # write a description of what's in the branch $ git push origin archived/hcayless-appcrit $ git branch -d hcayless-appcrit $ git push --delete hcayless-appcrit That tags and annotates the branch, pushes it up to Github, deletes the branch locally, and then deletes in on the remote. If you want to go digging through the old branch, you can do $ git checkout -b hcayless-appcrit archived/hcayless-appcrit And you'll have a local copy you can mess around with. I like that. Thoughts?