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The Data Archive Extension

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Over time, your business will accumulate a substantial amount of data, and as an administrator, it's probably a good idea to have a strategy for archiving data. Having lots of data can slow things down, for example, it might take slightly longer to generate reports, or even lock records. Additionally, large amounts of data can lead to increased storage costs.

The Data Archive extension provides a basic framework for archiving and backing up data as part of date compression. Date compression consolidates related entries into a single entry and deletes the originals. Learn more at Compress Data with Date Compression. However, there might be value in keeping that data, so rather than deleting it, you can archive it for later use.

Start Archiving Data

The extension is pre-installed and available on the Extension Management, so you don't need to do anything to get started. The extension is also available on AppSource.

Your data archives are listed on the Data Archive List page. Each archive can contain data from multiple tables, and can hold up to 10,000 records. If there are more than 10,000 records in a table, a second archive will be created for the next 10,000 records, and so on. For example, if you archive 10,100 G/L entries, Business Central creates one "G/L Entry" archive for the first 10,000 entries, and then a second archive for the remaining 100 entries.

After you archive data, you can explore it using Microsoft Excel or as a CSV file.

  • If you use the Excel option, the workbook will contain one worksheet for each data archive table.
  • If you use the CSV option, you'll get a ZIP file that contains one CSV file for each data archive table.

Tip

The Excel and CSV options make it easier to use another app or service to move the data to another location, such as Azure Blob storage, or an analysis tool, such as Microsoft Power BI.

The Data Archive extension is used by the following batch jobs for date compression.

Batch jobs
Date Comp. Item Budget Entries
Date Compress Bank Acc. Ledger
Date Compress Customer Ledger
Date Compress FA Ledger
Date Compress General Ledger
Date Compress Insurance Ledger
Date Compress Maint. Ledger
Date Compress Maint. Ledger
Date Compress Resource Ledger
Date Compress VAT Entries
Date Compress Vendor Ledger
Date Compress Whse. Entries
Date Compr. G/L Budget Entries

To start archiving data when you run one of the batch jobs, turn on the Archive Deleted Entries toggle.

Storage Considerations

The archived data is stored in the Tenant Media table. We recommend that you export old archives to, for example, a CSV file and then delete the old archive records.

See Also

Manage Storage by Deleting Documents or Compressing Data