Archive Manager uses a normal share on your network to create a mirror of your live file system's folder structure. Archived files are then moved into this mirrored structure. When they have been in the archive share for the period of time you specify without being recalled back to the live file system, they are written out to the location you choose to be backed up/deleted. This last step is done by a special type of job called a 'graveyard' job, which like normal 'archive' jobs is fully configurable and can be scheduled to run once, daily, weekly, monthly, manually or once at a specific time of your choosing.

The archive share itself can be located anywhere that you choose, thus giving you a centralised storage location that retains a great degree of flexibility.

The basic operation of Archive Manager is very straightforward, as the graphic below shows. This example demonstrates how Archive Manager can be deployed on a dedicated server, although many other configurations are possible including ones that require no additional hardware at all..

There are many ways that Archive Manager can be set up, and the example above is just one.

If you do not have a server that you wish to set up as a dedicated Archive Manager server you could just as easily use an existing machine, create a new share on the existing volume that contains your live files, compress it with Windows built in NTFS compression and install Archive Manager.

The files in your live file system, the installed copy of Archive Manager and your archive share are all seperate components of the same solution and as such can all be located separately (or all on the same machine, it's up to you).

Easy access to archived files

As well as a range of Windwos shortcuts, Archive Manager  can leave behind true seamless Hard Links to archived files. To the end user, archived files appear to still be in thier origional position, even though they are now located on a completely different machine. Unlike other solutions, Archive Manager does this without the need to install any kind of 3rd party filter drivers or other software on client machines.

Deployment

You do not need to spend significant amounts of money and time installing dedicated database servers like you would have to do with most other Archiving and HSM products. Often there are no additional hardware requirements at all. If you enable compression for your archived files then you can locate your archive on the same hardware that hosts your live file system and still have a net reduction in the size of your file system. If you do decide to deploy additional hardware then a suitable low end file server if needed (and it normally isn't) can be sourced for 1/5 the cost of an equivalent database server.

You get all the features you'd expect, like the ability for users to recall files that have been archived by clicking on a shortcut that is left behind by the archiving process, and a few that you wouldn't like the ability to archive over a WAN.

Archive Manager will even intelligently maintain its archives integrity with highly developed logic that runs as a background maintenance job. It keeps the archives NTFS permissions in sync with the live file system and detects when users delete or move recall shortcuts.