Why archive data and not delete it?

No data ever gets deleted from the BookTrack system. It can only be archived, so we need to filter out all the old irrelevant data to make our data make current sense. Archiving data, filters or removes it from the current or live data so that we can work with only the currently relevant data. This way data from of grade 12s from previous years, students who left the school and data of lost or discarded books do not clutter our current data. The info is still there, and accessible, but it does not form part of our currently relevant data. We have to explicitly go to the archived data views provided by BookTrack to access that data.

We don’t delete any data to make it possible to create reports that span several years or even decades so that we can later analyze the data for long term trends etc.