Archiving is an important part of SDLTMS long term use and making sure that your system is running as efficiently as possible.  The general aim of this is to remove any unnecessary jobs, related files and database records that in large quantities can have a negative affect on performance.

 Archiving removes completed jobs from the system, having and archiving strategy has several benefits to:

• Database -less records to search through will benefit the efficiency of the database.  A single job could have hundreds, even thousands of related records as we store all the related information and edits of segments. 
• Network files- live jobs are stored in a single network path.  Keeping the number of files in this folder to a minimum will allow for faster network access when SDLTMS accesses and creates files within it.
• UI navigation - a result of the above mentioned database benefits and file access.  Many screens and reports will display the completed jobs and so delay their generation on screen.  In addition - many resources have and "in-use field" which is populated by searching all live jobs that are using the resource.  The more records in the system the longer this check will take to run and if a resource is in use - it cannot be removed from the system.

Not archiving jobs doesn't have too much of an impact in the short term as the detrimental affect of this is not noticeable, over longer periods of time SDLTMS can see performance related issues.

 Once archived the jobs can be searched for within SDLTMS and the files can also be accessed and downloaded, the archived job data files are stored in a separate network path and so do not affect the day to day usage of live jobs.