How is archiving done?
Data may need to be retained for both internal and external reasons. Today organizations are storing more data for longer periods of time for many internal reasons. Typically, data is stored longer than it used to be to enable analytical processes to be conducted on the data.

But external reasons, typically driven by the mandate to comply with legal and governmental regulations are another significant factor driving the need to store more data.

Database archiving is part of a namely data archiving. Data exists in many formats and for many purposes, and only a small percentage of it is actually in a database.

Physical documents, electronic documents, computer files and data sets, e-mail, and multimedia files are all examples of data that may reasonably need to be archived at some point of time.

Database archiving is the process of removing selected data records from operational databases that are not expected to be referenced again and storing them in an archive data store, where they can be retrieved if needed.

E-mail archiving is one of the most important mode of archiving process.

Intelligent archiving solutions address one of the most fundamental challenges of e-mail storage and discovery, ie data classification.

Rather than treating all e-mail the same, Intelligent archiving offers intelligent classification and categorizes messages according to their relevance to specific business purposes. Only when data is appropriately classified can it then be intelligently filtered, retained, and discovered.

In order to justify the cost of an archiving solution, organizations must consider the long-term impact of the archive on IT as well as the end-user.

There are two common ways of identifying the data which has to be archived.

User Classification
Many organizations must rely on their users to make difficult decisions about what e-mail to save or delete. However, this often burdens them with too many processes and impacts their productivity.

For example, the user may be tasked with using a web interface, saving an email to a specific folder, or using an application plug-in to specify metadata.