Data archiving is intended to more than just save the contents of database tables. Archiving must also meet the following requirements:

• Statutory requirements
  Data must be archived in such a way that it can be analyzed at any time in the future. In some countries, such as the USA, the tax authorities require that the data be stored transparently so they can analyze the data with their own computer systems.

• Hardware independence
  Because the encoding of numerical fields, such as integers depends on the hardware being used, archiving must ensure that information about hardware is appended to the archived data so that the data can be displayed later with different hardware.

• Release dependence
  Because the data structure may depend on the version of R/3 you are using, record structure and field definition information must also be archived.

• Data dependencies
  Data objects often depend on other data objects. Consequently, in order to remove a specific data object from the system, you must determine whether other data objects must already be archived, or must be archived at the same time.

• Enterprise and business structure
  Some data is only of use if you are familiar with an enterprise’s organizational structure, such as how it is divided into different areas for sales. Archiving must therefore ensure that this information is also archived.
  

The above list shows that data archiving requires a detailed knowledge of data semantics. For this reason, R/3’s application-integrated archiving approach is superior to archiving products that are not integrated into R/3 (database tools).