Key Takeaways
- Salesforce data archiving moves inactive records to a retention-governed tier, cutting storage cost without losing audit access or breaking compliance.
- Additional Salesforce data storage costs roughly $125 per 500 MB per month — making historical data one of the most expensive idle assets in the stack.
- Native options like Big Objects, External Objects, and Salesforce Archive solve parts of the problem but leave gaps in legal hold, immutability, and cross-application retention.
- A working archive programme requires retention policy, legal hold orchestration, referential integrity, and quarterly retrieval testing and not just data movement.
- Multi-application orgs running Salesforce alongside SAP, Workday, or Epic need one retention policy across all systems, not one per vendor.
- Archon archives Salesforce data alongside 200+ source systems under unified retention, WORM immutability, chain-of-custody and is purpose-built for enterprise audit defensibility.
Salesforce charges roughly $125 per month for every 500 MB of additional data storage you consume past your allocation. That works out to $250 a month for a gigabyte. $3,000 a year. $150,000 a year for an org carrying 50 GB of historical data, and that is a conservative estimate for a 1,000-user Enterprise Edition instance five years into its lifecycle.
Compare that to roughly $0.023 per gigabyte per month on AWS S3, and the gap stops looking like a pricing decision. It starts looking like a structural one.
Most of what fills that storage is not your live pipeline. It is the 80% of records that have not been touched in two years like closed cases from 2019, Tasks from departed reps, EmailMessage records from campaigns nobody remembers running. They sit on Salesforce’s most expensive tier because there is nowhere else for them to go without breaking reports, snapping references, or failing the next audit.
That is the archiving problem. This guide covers what Salesforce data archiving actually means, why storage cost is only the first of three reasons to do it, what your native options can and cannot handle, how to implement an archive without breaking your org, and the point at which native tooling stops being enough.
What is Salesforce Data Archiving?
Salesforce data archiving is the deliberate movement of inactive records out of your live Salesforce org to a secondary storage layer, where the records remain searchable, retrievable, and compliant but no longer consume your active org’s storage, compute, or query budget.
The word “deliberate” matters. Archiving is not the same as deleting, and it is not the same as backing up.
- Deleting removes data permanently (or to the Recycle Bin for 15 days). It’s fine for genuine duplicates and test records. It’s a disaster for anything covered by a retention policy.
- Backing up creates a point-in-time copy used for disaster recovery. The copy lives outside Salesforce, but the original still sits in production, still consuming storage and still slowing queries. Backup answers the question “can I restore my org if something breaks?” It does not answer “how do I keep seven years of customer interactions without paying Salesforce for seven years of storage?”
- Archiving moves the source record out of production. The data continues to exist — under retention policy, with an audit trail, and accessible to the right people — just not inside the CRM.
A working Salesforce archive should let you do five things on demand:
- Find a record
- Retrieve it complete with its relationships
- Prove its integrity hasn’t been tampered with
- Apply legal hold when required
- Delete it once the retention clock expires
Why Salesforce Data Archiving Matters
Two forces push Salesforce orgs toward archiving, and they almost always arrive together.
1. Performance degrades as objects grow
Salesforce’s own Large Data Volume (LDV) guidance flags performance risks as objects scale into the millions of records. Query selectivity, index efficiency, full sandbox refresh time, and report execution all degrade. The objects most likely to cross LDV thresholds in active orgs — are the same ones that top the storage consumer list:
- Task
- Event
- EmailMessage
- Case
- ContentVersion
- OpportunityHistory
The performance problem and the storage problem are usually the same problem.
2. Compliance obligations require records you can produce on demand
The retention demands sit in different regulations, but they overlap.
- SEC Rule 17a-4(f) requires broker-dealer records on non-rewriteable storage with auditable retention
- GDPR Article 5(1)(e) requires data to be kept no longer than necessary, which only works if you can identify and delete it
- HIPAA requires six-year retention for covered entities
- SOX, DPDPA, PDPL, and a dozen industry-specific mandates each add their own clock
Each of these regulations evaluates the same things: completeness, immutability, retrievability, and chain of custody. A live CRM is not designed to demonstrate any of them.
The ROI of Data Archiving
See the CIO framework for calculating archive ROI across your entire application estate. (10 min read)
What Data Should You Archive in Salesforce?
In a typical enterprise Salesforce org, 80–90% of records are inactive at any given moment. They are not bad records — closed deals, completed cases, old activity logs all have legitimate retention reasons. They just sit on the most expensive, performance-sensitive storage tier in the stack.
The first job of any archiving programme is to identify what should move.
Storage limit exceeded? Start here.
If you are reading this because your org just hit 100% or the 110% hard block, here is the triage path before you start a full archiving programme:
- Check Setup → Storage Usage. Identify the top three objects by record count and storage footprint.
- Empty the Recycle Bin. Deleted records still count toward storage until the bin is purged.
- Identify and purge test data, sandbox artefacts, and integration log records that are no longer needed.
- Check EmailMessage — see below. Disabling HTML body storage may recover gigabytes overnight.
- Then move to the structured archiving process in the sections that follow.
Data storage vs file storage
Salesforce bills data storage (records in objects) and file storage (ContentVersion, Attachments) separately, at very different rates. Data storage overage runs roughly $250 per GB per month. File storage overage runs roughly $5 per GB per month. In mature orgs, file storage often exceeds data storage by 10x or more — one Reddit thread reported 823 GB of file storage against 67 GB of data storage.
File archiving requires a different approach from data archiving. Common patterns include offloading files to external storage (SharePoint, S3, Azure Blob) and keeping a link-back on the parent record, or using tools like XFiles Pro or Grax that automate the offload and display a component inside Salesforce. The ContentVersion, ContentDocument, ContentDocumentLink, and FeedAttachment records must all move together — archive one without the others and the file becomes orphaned or inaccessible.
The Email Message Problem
EmailMessage is the single largest storage consumer in most Service Cloud orgs. By default, Salesforce stores both the plain-text body and the full HTML body for every inbound and outbound email. In orgs running Email-to-Case at scale, EmailMessage alone can account for 30–50% of total data storage.
The quickest win before formal archiving: check whether your org needs the HTML body. If plain text is sufficient for compliance and reference, disabling HTML body storage can recover gigabytes immediately. After that, archiving EmailMessage records older than your retention window is typically the single highest-impact action.
Top object candidates
- Task — every call logged, follow-up created, and workflow to-do creates a Task record. Active sales or service orgs accumulate millions per year. Tasks have no native lifecycle. They never retire on their own.
- Event — calendar entries, meetings, calls. Same growth profile as Task, scaled to team size.
- EmailMessage — the heaviest single object in most Service Cloud orgs. Dual text+HTML storage multiplies the footprint.
- Case — closed cases that legal or compliance require you to keep for 5–10 years, especially in regulated industries.
- ContentVersion — every file upload, including overwritten versions. Files are stored separately from data, but the relational records linking them are not.
- OpportunityHistory — auto-populated history tracking, often forgotten and never purged.
- High-volume custom objects — anything with a “Log,” “Audit,” “Activity,” or “Transaction” suffix.
Where to look first
Setup → Storage Usage shows your current allocation, top consumers by object, and top users by record count.
Salesforce Optimizer adds recommendations and flags performance hotspots. A few SOQL count queries by year (for example, SELECT COUNT() FROM Task WHERE CreatedDate < LAST_N_YEARS:5) will tell you how much of each object is historical.
Selection criteria worth standardizing
- Age — records older than X years (X depends on regulation)
- Last activity date — anything untouched for Y months
- Status — Closed Won, Closed Lost, Resolved, Cancelled
- Owner — records owned by inactive users
- Regulatory clock — when the retention window starts and ends for each object
Native Salesforce Archiving Options and Where these Fail
Salesforce gives you five native options for archiving. Each solves part of the problem. None solves all of it.
1. Big Objects
Big Objects are designed for very large volumes of historical data (billions of records) stored separately from standard object tables. They have their own indexed lookup model and do not count against your standard data storage allocation.
What they’re good for: long-term retention of high-volume data where you control the access pattern and have engineering capacity to build a retrieval UI.
What they aren’t good for: anything that needs a standard report, a trigger, a workflow, or a real-time query.
Big Objects support only async SOQL for large queries. They have no standard Salesforce UI, so every retrieval interface must be built in Visualforce or Lightning Web Components. Indexes are immutable once created. Schema changes are limited.
For most orgs, Big Objects are the right answer for one or two specific datasets and a significant engineering project to deploy.
2. External Objects + Salesforce Connect
External Objects expose data living in another system (often a database, data lake, or archive) as if it were inside Salesforce, using OData v2/v4 or a custom Apex connector.
What they’re good for: keeping the user experience consistent. Admins, agents, and reps still see archived records inside the Salesforce UI, but the data lives elsewhere.
What they aren’t good for: high-frequency access (callout limits apply), real-time reporting (cached vs live tradeoffs), or use cases that need full SOQL semantics. Salesforce Connect is licensed separately, and pricing scales with the volume of external data referenced.
3. Field History Archival
Salesforce retains Field History Tracking for roughly 18 months in the UI and up to 24 months via the API. After that, the data is permanently deleted. This catches many admins off guard.
The Field Audit Trail add-on extends retention up to 10 years per field with configurable policies. It is a paid add-on, typically priced at 10% of net Salesforce spend. For orgs that cannot justify the cost, the practical workaround is to export FieldHistoryArchive records to an external store (SQL database, S3, or a dedicated archive) on a scheduled basis before the 24-month window closes.
What it’s good for: regulatory field-level change tracking.
What it isn’t: a substitute for record-level archiving. It tracks changes to fields, not the records themselves.
4. Data Export Service
A scheduled weekly or monthly export of your entire org’s data, delivered as CSV. Free with most editions.
What it’s good for: disaster recovery and ad-hoc data dumps.
What it isn’t: an archive. There is no retrieval UI, no metadata preservation, no chain of custody, no legal hold. It’s a backup mechanism mis-classified as archiving in many internal documents.
5. Salesforce Archive (add-on)
Salesforce introduced a native Archive feature, rolling out from the Winter ’25 release as an add-on license. It moves inactive records to lower-cost storage while keeping them queryable inside Salesforce, with general availability rolling out by region.
Pricing is typically $10 per GB with a 50 GB minimum, working out to around $6,000 per year at the entry point.
What it’s good for: extending native storage economics inside the Salesforce stack for orgs that want a single-vendor answer.
What it isn’t: a multi-application archive. It addresses Salesforce data only, governed by Salesforce, retained on Salesforce infrastructure.
Native option comparison
Across all five native options, the same gaps recur: legal hold orchestration, write-once-read-many immutability at the storage layer, retention policy enforcement that survives admin configuration changes, cross-application search and discovery, and the ability to decommission Salesforce entirely while keeping the records.
| Option | Use Case | Retrieval | Reportability | Scale Limit | Dev Effort |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Big Objects | High-volume cold storage | Async SOQL, custom UI | No standard reports | Billions of records | High |
| External Objects | Surface external data in SF | Real-time or cached via OData | Limited | Callout limits apply | Medium |
| Field History Archival | Field-level change tracking | Built-in views | Custom only | 10 yrs with add-on | Low |
| Data Export Service | DR / data dump | Manual CSV reload | None | Org size | Low |
| Salesforce Archive | Native cold tier (add-on) | Queryable within SF | Limited | Per license terms | Medium |
How to Archive Salesforce Data: A Step-by-Step Implementation
A working archive programme follows the same eight steps regardless of which target tier you choose.
Step 1. Audit the data
Run Setup → Storage Usage and Salesforce Optimizer. SOQL-count high-volume objects by year. Identify any object above 1 million records as a Tier-1 candidate.
What good looks like: a single spreadsheet listing every object, current record count, growth rate, and storage footprint.
Step 2. Define retention
For each object, map the regulatory clock. A closed Opportunity in financial services is governed by different retention than a closed Case in healthcare. Document everything in a retention matrix and version-control it.
A practical retention matrix looks like this:
| Object | Regulation | Retention | Clock starts | Owner |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Case | HIPAA | 6 years | From closure date | Compliance |
| Opportunity | SOX | 7 years | From close date | Finance |
| Task | Internal | 3 years | From activity date | IT |
| EmailMessage | GDPR | Until consent withdrawal +30d | From send date | DPO |
Get this signed off by Legal, Compliance, and the data owner. Review it annually.
Step 3. Define legal hold
Identify your hold sources — matter management, e-discovery, HR investigations. Decide where holds are enforced: at the application, at the archive, or at both. Plan for hold reconciliation before every retention deletion.
What good looks like: a documented hold-to-archive integration with audit logs.
Step 4. Choose the archive method
This is where most teams stall.
Decision factors:
- Data volume
- Retention duration
- Multi-application scope
- Regulatory requirements
- Retrieval SLA
- Dev capacity
- Archived data must remain visible inside Salesforce
What good looks like: a decision document explaining why the chosen option fits, signed by the data architecture lead.
Step 5. Map dependencies
Master-detail and lookup relationships, junction objects, formula fields, roll-up summaries. Anything that depends on a record you plan to archive will break unless you handle it deliberately. Sandbox first.
What good looks like: a dependency map per object, with a reconciliation plan for each parent-child relationship.
Worked example: archiving Accounts and Contacts
Accounts and Contacts sit at the top of Salesforce’s relationship tree. Every Opportunity, Case, Task, Event, and custom child object looks up to them. This makes them the last objects you archive, not the first.
The safe order: archive child objects first (Tasks, Events, Cases, Opportunities), then archive Contacts, then Accounts.
Maintain a lookup pointer in the archive so cross-references survive. Before archiving any Account, check for roll-up summary fields, formula fields referencing the Account, sharing rules tied to Account ownership, and any active integration that queries the Account by ID.
For orgs that want to keep Accounts visible but de-clutter for sales staff, consider a status-based approach: flag inactive Accounts with a custom “Archived” checkbox, filter them from default list views and assignment rules, and only physically move them to the archive tier when the retention clock justifies it.
Step 6. Run a pilot
One object, one fiscal year, one user group. Archive the records, validate retrieval from the target tier, confirm reports still resolve, and time the round trip end-to-end.
What good looks like: a pilot retrospective with retrieval times, error rates, and user feedback.
Step 7. Scale and automate
Move from pilot to production with scheduled batches, monitoring on every run, and alerting on failure.
Set thresholds: how much can be archived per batch, per day, per quarter.
What good looks like: archive jobs running on schedule for 90 days without manual intervention.
Step 8. Govern
- Quarterly retrieval test
- Annual retention policy review
- Audit log review tied to your SOC controls
Document everything for the next audit.
What good looks like: an archive that survives an auditor’s first question and their second.
Salesforce Data Archiving Best Practices
Ten practices separate an archive that holds up under audit from one that holds up until someone actually opens it.
- Archive on a schedule, not in response to a storage alert. Reactive archiving creates inconsistent retention and broken references. Set a quarterly cadence and stick to it.
- Preserve referential integrity. Master-detail children orphaned from their parents become invisible. Junction objects fail silently. Archive parent and child records together, or maintain explicit pointers.
- Capture metadata at ingestion. Object, user, timestamp, field history, automation context, and the policy version under which the record was archived. The audit trail starts here.
- Enforce immutability at the storage layer, not the application. WORM (Write-Once-Read-Many) belongs at the storage tier. Application-layer “immutability” is a configuration setting an admin can change.
- Apply legal hold before retention deletion. Reconcile holds before every purge cycle. A retention policy that deletes a record on hold is a regulatory finding waiting to happen.
- Keep archived data searchable in business-friendly interfaces. A CSV dump is not a search interface. Users abandon archives they can’t navigate.
- Test retrieval quarterly. An archive you cannot retrieve from is not an archive. It’s a graveyard. Pick three random records, retrieve them, document the time it took.
- Document chain of custody. Who archived what, when, under which policy version, with what hash. Auditors ask for this. So does Legal during e-discovery.
- Decouple retention enforcement from CRM configuration. Policy changes should not require a Salesforce release. Retention belongs in a policy engine, not in flow steps and field updates.
- Plan for cross-application retention. A customer’s lifecycle data lives in Salesforce, your ERP, your billing system, your support tool, and three different inboxes. Retention rules that apply to one and not the others create the worst kind of audit finding (partial compliance).
Common Challenges and Pitfalls
The same handful of pitfalls catch the majority of failing archive programmes.
- The Big Object UI problem: No standard UI. Every retrieval workflow needs custom Visualforce or LWC. Teams underestimate this once and over-engineer it twice.
- Orphaned child records: Archiving a parent without its children or vice versa leaves invisible records consuming storage, breaking reports, and failing audits.
- File archiving complexity: Files in Salesforce are spread across ContentVersion, ContentDocument, ContentDocumentLink, and FeedAttachment must move together. Moving one without the others orphans the file.
- Audit trail erosion: Records exported as raw CSV lose their field history, automation context, and user attribution. The archive technically exists. The chain of custody does not.
- Calling backup an archive: Backup answers the disaster recovery question. Archive answers the retention and compliance question. They use different storage tiers, different policies, and different governance models. Conflating them is the single most common audit finding in this category.
- Vendor concentration risk: Archiving Salesforce data inside the Salesforce stack, even through native add-ons, means the system of record and the system of memory share the same vendor, the same pricing model, and the same availability dependency.
- Sandbox rehydration: Sandbox refreshes copy production data, including the records you just archived. Without configuration changes, your sandboxes will rehydrate retired data after every refresh.
Seven ways archives break. One conversation to avoid all of them.Talk to an Archon architect who’s deployed Salesforce archiving for regulated enterprise orgs.
When Native Salesforce Archiving Isn’t Enough
Native Salesforce archiving works well within a single application boundary. Most enterprise archiving requirements cross that boundary.
The signals you’ve outgrown native:
- Multiple regulated applications need a single retention story. Salesforce, SAP, Workday, Epic, and the corporate email system all retain records covering the same customer event. Inconsistent retention across them is an audit finding.
- Compliance demands evidentiary integrity. SEC 17a-4(f), eIDAS-aligned QTSP requirements, and ETSI standards expect non-rewriteable storage, trusted timestamps, and chain of custody — capabilities that sit below the application layer.
- Application decommissioning is on the roadmap. Org consolidation after M&A, retirement of legacy CRMs, or migration from Salesforce Classic to Lightning. Decommissioning needs an archive that survives the source system being switched off.
- Audit retrieval SLAs are measured in hours. A regulator, an auditor, or opposing counsel will not wait three weeks for your CSV export to be re-imported.
- You operate in multiple regions with conflicting retention rules. GDPR’s right to erasure, India’s DPDPA, the SEC’s seven-year clock, and HIPAA’s six-year window all apply to subsets of the same dataset.
- Cross-system discovery is a regular event. E-discovery requests, internal investigations, and subject access requests that span Salesforce, email, and ERP.
What an enterprise archive adds:
- Immutability at ingestion, not configuration.
- Retention orchestration across all systems under one policy engine.
- Independent retrieval — the archive remains queryable when the source system is decommissioned.
- Cross-application search across structured and unstructured content.
- Decommissioning support — full audit access after Salesforce, SAP, or any other source has been retired.
Native vs Enterprise archive — capability matrix
| Capability | Native Salesforce | Enterprise Archive (Archon) |
|---|---|---|
| Scope | Salesforce only | All enterprise systems |
| Immutability | Application-layer config | Storage-layer WORM |
| Retention policy engine | Per-object configuration | Unified cross-application |
| Legal hold orchestration | Not native | Built in, auditable |
| Chain of custody | Limited metadata | Cryptographic, timestamped |
| Cross-application search | None | Unified discovery |
| Decommissioning support | Source must remain live | Source can be retired |
| Audit retrieval SLA | Hours to days | Minutes to hours |
| Regulatory alignment | Vendor-specific | SEC 17a-4, eIDAS, HIPAA |
This is the gap that platforms like Archon Data Store are built to close. Archon archives Salesforce records with WORM immutability, legal hold orchestration, and cross-application search built into the platform rather than bolted on.
See how Archon archives Salesforce alongside SAP, Workday, and 200+ systems under one retention policy.
What an Enterprise-Grade Salesforce Archiving Strategy Looks Like
Enterprise-grade archiving sits outside the CRM, operates independently of Salesforce’s availability and pricing model, and is designed from the ground up to handle the full complexity of enterprise retention.
1. Independence From the Source System
Native archiving keeps historical data inside Salesforce or inside Salesforce’s own infrastructure via Big Objects. Enterprise archiving moves data to a governed repository that exists independently of the CRM.
- Historical records survive a Salesforce migration, consolidation, or decommission without disruption
- Audit requests can be fulfilled even if Salesforce is unavailable, under change freeze, or being replaced
- Evidence is not subject to Salesforce’s access control model at the time of retrieval
- Long-term costs are governed by archive storage economics, not CRM licensing
2. A Managed Policy Engine, Not Custom Code
Big Objects require custom Apex jobs, retry logic, and hand-built validation pipelines. Enterprise archiving platforms replace all of that with a managed policy engine:
- Retention rules are defined per object, per record type, and per business unit without custom development
- Archive jobs run automatically on the policy schedule, no engineering resource required to maintain them
- Pre-purge validation, reconciliation, and sign-off workflows are built into the platform
- Changes to retention policy are configuration changes, not code deployments
This fundamentally changes the operational model. Archive policy becomes a governance function, not an engineering project.
3. Referential Integrity Preserved Automatically
ilMessages, Activities, and Attachments is not an archive; it is a broken record.
Enterprise archiving platforms preserve the full relationship graph automatically:
- Case ↔ EmailMessage ↔ Activity ↔ Attachment — all archived together as a coherent unit
- Opportunity ↔ OpportunityLineItems ↔ related files and history
- Account ↔ Contacts ↔ full activity and communication history
- Custom object hierarchies from integration pipelines
Retrieval is only useful if context is intact. Enterprise archiving is built around that requirement.
4. Enterprise Governance Built In
Big Objects offer storage. Enterprise archiving platforms offer governance. The difference in practice:
| Governance Capability | Salesforce Big Objects | Enterprise Archiving Platform |
|---|---|---|
| Legal Hold | ✗ No native legal hold capability, must be custom-built | ✓ Legal hold applied at record or policy level, independent of the source system |
| Retention Enforcement | ✗ Retention logic must be coded and scheduled manually | ✓ Automated retention enforcement with policy-based scheduling and audit trail |
| Audit Trail | ✗ No built-in archive audit logging | ✓ Every archive action, access, and deletion is logged and reportable |
| Role-Based Access | ✗ Inherits Salesforce permissions, no independent access control | ✓ Independent RBAC, access to the archive does not require a Salesforce licence or access |
| Encryption | ✗ Shield Encryption not supported — risk of clear-text archived data | ✓ Encryption at rest and in transit, independent of CRM encryption model |
| Search & Restore | ✗ No native UI, requires a custom-built interface | ✓ Built-in search across archived records; restore workflow available out of the box |
| Cross-System Coverage | ✗ Salesforce records only | ✓ Can archive across Salesforce, ERP, service platforms, and other regulated systems |
| System Independence | ✗ Dependent on Salesforce availability and licensing | ✓ Operates independently, archive accessible regardless of CRM status |
5. Cross-System Archiving Under a Single Governance Framework
Enterprise archiving platforms extend the same governance model: the same retention policies, legal hold controls, and audit trails — across every regulated system in the organization.
- A single retention policy can apply simultaneously to Salesforce Cases, ERP service records, and communication logs
- A legal hold triggered by a regulatory inquiry covers all relevant systems from one interface
- Audit responses draw from a single governed archive, rather than requiring manual extraction from multiple live systems
6. Long-Term Cost Architecture
Salesforce storage is priced for operational performance. Enterprise archive storage is priced for volume retention. The cost gap between the two widens significantly as data age and volume increase.
| Factor | Salesforce Native / Big Objects | Enterprise Archiving Platform |
|---|---|---|
| Storage cost model | Salesforce licensing tiers — expensive at scale | Archive storage economics — fraction of CRM cost per GB |
| Cost as volume grows | Scales with Salesforce pricing | Scales with commodity object storage pricing |
| Engineering overhead | High — custom code required for every capability | Low — managed platform; configuration not code |
| License dependency | Archive access requires a Salesforce license | Archive access independent of CRM license count |
| Migration risk | Data moves with Salesforce — transition adds cost | Archive is portable and system-independent |
Archon — Independent, Governed Enterprise Archive for Salesforce CRM Data
Archon is an enterprise-grade, compliance-first data archiving platform built to do what CRM tools are not designed to do: govern, retain, and make defensible the full historical record of an enterprise across Salesforce and beyond.
Archon is architected directly around the three compounding pressures that unchecked Salesforce data accumulation creates. Each one has a specific, deliberate answer.
| Pressure | What the organization experiences | How Archon resolves it |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | Storage add-ons, inflating sandbox sizes, renewal negotiations that never resolve, paying CRM pricing for historical data | Moves inactive data to cost-efficient archive storage. Up to 80% compression on source data. Storage scales independently of compute; costs grow predictably, not exponentially. |
| Performance | Slower reports, degraded search, API strain, batch jobs that take longer quarter on quarter as object tables expand | Removes historical records from the active Salesforce tier entirely, restoring query selectivity and report speed. Salesforce operates on live data only. |
| Compliance | Retention obligations that outlast CRM lifecycles, audit requests that require manual extraction, legal holds scoped to a single system | Centralized, automated retention policies applied per object and per regulation. Legal hold, defensible disposition, full audit trail — all independent of Salesforce availability. |
Core features of Archon
A Single, Unified Archive for All Your Data
Archon unifies structured, semi-structured, and unstructured files — documents, emails, attachments — in one governed platform.
Intelligent Storage Tiering That Controls Cost
Archon manages data across hot, warm, and cold storage tiers by automatically moving records to the most cost-appropriate tier based on age and access patterns.
Automated Retention and Defensible Disposition
Archon applies retention policies per object, per data type, and per regulatory requirement automatically, without manual intervention.
Legal Hold That Works Across the Enterprise
Legal holds in Archon stop the purge of any record instantly, overriding retention policy at the point of instruction.
Sub-Second Search Across Massive Data Volumes
Archon’s distributed search capability retrieves historical records including content within documents, emails, and files in sub-seconds, even across petabyte-scale datasets.
Complete Referential Integrity — Relationships Preserved
Archon preserves the full relationship graph of every archived record like parent-to-child, object-to-file, record-to-history — so that retrieved data has the context required to be useful, defensible, and complete.
Enterprise-Grade Governance and Security
Archon enforces role-based access control independent of Salesforce permissions. Encryption at the data entity and storage level protects sensitive records. Every action across the platform is captured in a tamper-evident audit log.
See Archon in Action
Archon is built for enterprises that have outgrown what Salesforce-native archiving can offer. If cost, performance, or compliance pressure is already visible in your org book a personalized demo to speak to an archiving specialist in our team for your storage assessment
