Data archiving moves rarely-accessed information to separate storage for long-term keeping. Unlike backups that protect active data for quick recovery, archives serve as your historical record, housing information you rarely need but must keep.
There are multiple reasons you need a data archival strategy.
As your organization grows, your data multiplies. This growth creates real challenges because storage costs skyrocket when keeping everything on high-performance primary storage. Systems slow down when databases bulge with years of inactive records, and compliance risks grow. Plus, archiving data has a massive ROI because storage costs are so much lower.
When Should You Archive Data Instead of Keeping It Live?
The split between active and inactive data determines what belongs in production versus archives:
- Active data: Frequently accessed information essential for daily operations.
- Inactive data: Historical information rarely accessed but still valuable for reference or needed for compliance.
Archive data when:
- Nobody's touched it in 12+ months.
- Projects or cases have finished.
- Users have left or accounts closed.
- Records are no longer needed for daily operations or reporting.
Moving inactive data to archives offers big benefits. When you archive Salesforce data, for example, you’ll see performance improvements, cost savings, and still have your inactive data around for compliance purposes.
Consider a manufacturing company that must keep quality control data for regulatory reasons. Current production data needs immediate access, but five-year-old test results can safely move to archives and reduce database load while keeping records available for audits or litigation.
Note that different industries have different retention requirements:
- HIPAA requires healthcare providers to keep patient records for 6 years from creation or last use. To learn more, you can refer to our blog about HIPAA data backup requirements.
- Financial institutions under SOX must keep certain records for 7 years.
- GDPR requires organizations to store personal data only as long as necessary for its intended purpose.
What Should a Data Archival Strategy Include?
A data archival strategy needs several connected parts working together:
1. Clear Data Retention Policies
Develop retention rules based on data categories and business functions. Your policies should spell out:
- Which data categories get archived.
- When archiving happens (time-based or event-based triggers).
- How long different data types stay retained.
Match retention timelines with compliance requirements. For example, FINRA Rule 4511 requires brokers to keep certain records for at least 6 years, while IRS regulations demand 7 years for tax documents.
2. The Right Storage Infrastructure
Your storage choice significantly affects long-term success. Consider:
- Cloud-based archives (AWS, GCP, Azure) that scale easily and include built-in redundancy.
- On-premises solutions that give more direct control.
- Hybrid approaches that balance compliance requirements with cost optimization.
Judge options based on their scalability, cost-effectiveness, and retrieval speed. Many organizations increasingly prefer cloud archives for their flexibility and cost efficiency.
Modern backup and archive solutions like Flosum offer deployment flexibility across cloud, hybrid, and on-premises environments, so you can choose what fits your specific compliance needs.
3. Smart Indexing and Classification
Data classification before archiving allows you to quickly find records when needed:
- Tag records with metadata. Apply labels like record type, sensitivity level, department, or retention period.
- Use classification schemas. Group records by business logic such as object type, compliance category, or project so teams can retrieve what they need without scanning entire datasets.
- Enable audit tracking. Every classification and archive action should generate an audit log to create a verifiable chain of custody for internal reviews or regulatory audits.
- Control access to classification settings. Role-based access ensures only authorized users can modify tagging or retrieve sensitive records.
- Label regulated data early. Flag records that fall under GDPR, HIPAA, or SOX as part of the backup or archiving workflow.
4. Built-In Security and Access Control
Archived data often contains sensitive information needing strong privacy and security protection. Make sure to use encryption both in transit and at rest, apply role-based access control to limit authorized personnel, and implement tamper-proof storage for regulatory compliance.
Advanced options like bring-your-own-key (BYOK) encryption give organizations extra control over security, with solutions like Flosum offering these capabilities as standard features.
How Can You Make Data Archival Low-Maintenance?
Data archival shouldn't create excessive ongoing work. With proper setup, the process becomes mostly automated and needs minimal manual intervention.
Automate It Wherever You Can
Set up automated archival processes based on predefined triggers:
- Time-based archiving for data reaching specific age thresholds.
- Event-based archiving when projects close or employees leave.
- Capacity-based archiving when storage reaches certain levels.
Keep Retrieval Simple and Reliable
A backup system only delivers value if retrieval is fast, accurate, and dependable.
Granular recovery capabilities are essential because they allow you to restore specific records or even individual fields without having to roll back entire archives. It minimizes disruption and is especially important during audits, investigations, or legal discovery.
Point-in-time recovery adds another layer of flexibility. It gives you the ability to view data as it existed on a specific date, which is often required in regulatory inquiries or litigation. Legal teams and compliance officers rely on this functionality to establish timelines and confirm data authenticity.
Equally important is verification and you should test restoration processes on a regular basis.
Review and Refine Over Time
Archival strategies are not static. As your organization grows, regulations shift, and systems evolve, your backup and archive policies must be revisited.
Establish a regular review cadence, ideally aligned with your compliance audits, internal risk assessments, and platform upgrade cycles.
Note that changes to Salesforce objects, integrations, or metadata can quietly introduce blind spots into backup jobs or restore logic. Reviewing your configurations after major platform updates or org restructuring helps prevent gaps in protection. Archived data must reflect the current state of your business, not just the state when a policy was first written.
Monitor your system for signs that it’s time to adjust your archive strategy. Slower query times or bloated storage costs may indicate the need to adjust archive frequency or refine filtering criteria.
In parallel, gather feedback from users involved in restore operations. If they consistently struggle to find data or complete restores, your indexing or recovery workflows may need to be revised.
Your users can view, compare versions, and even retrieve items from your Flosum archive from right in Salesforce. There's no need for them to learn a different system or to create a ticket for an admin to retrieve items from the archive. Your Salesforce field level security is respected, so they only see what they are supposed to see.
What Problems Do Teams Run Into and How Can You Avoid Them?
Even carefully planned data archival strategies face challenges. Here’s how you can navigate around them.
Data Sprawl Across Multiple Systems
Organizations struggle when data is scattered across different platforms. The solution is to start with a thorough data inventory. Create a centralized catalog tracking data locations and types and consider tools that integrate with multiple sources to provide unified archival management.
Inadequate Classification and Difficult Retrieval
Poor classification leads to retrieval headaches, with employees wasting precious time trying to find the information they need.
If you don’t have one already, create a comprehensive classification scheme before archiving. Use consistent metadata tagging and add automated classification tools. Test your retrieval processes regularly with real-world scenarios. Keep manual steps to a minimum, automation ensures the process is repeatable when time is of the essence.
Recovery Time in Time-Sensitive Situations
When compliance reviews or audits require immediate access, delays cost you. You should be able to retrieve specific records within minutes of the request.
Integration Challenges with Legacy Systems
Older systems create major hurdles and extend archival project timelines.
Early in planning, assess compatibility between your archiving solution and the systems you use. Consider middleware solutions to bridge gaps and evaluate whether updating legacy systems might be more cost-effective long-term than complex integration work.
Scalability Concerns
As data volumes grow, archival systems struggle to keep up. To navigate this challenge, use cloud-based or easily expandable on-premises infrastructure.
Start Improving Your Data Archival Strategy
Good data archival balances compliance, cost-efficiency, and accessibility. It cuts storage expenses, boosts system performance, and maintains regulatory compliance.
Start with clear retention policies aligned with your industry regulations. Choose storage that offers the right mix of scalability and cost-effectiveness for your organization. Use smart classification to ensure you can find what you need when needed. And don’t compromise on security—your archived data deserves strong protection.
Standardize with templates and use scheduled jobs with notifications to remove the archive chore from your team with the confidence that the job is running regularly.
Begin with a manageable scope and focus on your most critical or voluminous data sets. As you gain experience, expand across more systems and data types.
