An active archive is a way of storing data you rarely use so that it stays online, searchable and recallable, while it sits on low-cost storage such as tape or object storage. Users see the archived files in a namespace they already know and get them back themselves, without filing a ticket or waiting for a restore.
For research IT teams, an active archive is the middle ground between keeping everything on expensive primary storage and locking old data away where nobody can find it.
Research data grows faster than budgets. Instruments, sequencers, microscopes and simulations produce files that are used intensely for a few weeks or months, then rarely touched again. Yet that data cannot simply be deleted: funders and journals expect it to be kept, results must be reproducible, and a later project often needs to reprocess it.
Most organisations end up with one of two bad options. Either the data stays on fast primary storage, which fills up and has to be expanded again and again. Or it goes to a backup or a tape vault, where it is safe but effectively invisible: researchers do not know what is there, and getting it back means asking IT. An active archive removes that choice.
An active archive combines three things.
Behind the namespace, the data can sit on several storage types at once: disk for recent data, object storage for warm data, tape for long-term copies. Many teams also keep two copies on different media or in different locations, so the archive doubles as a protection layer.
The three are often confused, but they answer different questions.
| Active archive | Backup | Cold storage | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Purpose | Keep data you rarely use, findable and usable | Restore data after loss or corruption | Store data as cheaply as possible |
| What it holds | The primary copy of inactive data | Copies of active data at points in time | Data written once, rarely read |
| How users get data back | Self-service, from the same namespace | Restore by IT, usually from a point in time | Request and wait, often hours or days |
| Typical media | Disk, object storage/cloud, tape | Disk, object storage/cloud, tape | Tape, deep cloud tiers |
A backup protects what you are working on today. An active archive is where finished data goes to live. Most research organisations need both, which we cover in a later article.
If you are evaluating an active archive, a short checklist helps:
An active archive pays off when a large share of your data is no longer used day to day but still has to be kept and occasionally reused. Typical signs:
If two or more of these sound familiar, an active archive is worth a look.
NODEUM Data Archiving builds the active archive around containers. A container is a virtual file system that users and applications see as a normal namespace. On each container you set placement policies that decide where data lives and when it moves. The storage behind a container is organised as secondary pools of type active archive, which can be tape, S3-compatible object storage or disk.
Users keep working through the container, while the placement policies move data between secondary pools in the background. Files stay listed in the namespace and can be recalled on demand, and copies written to tape use an open format so the data stays readable for the long term.
Want to know what an active archive would look like for your data? Book an archive sizing call with the NODEUM team.