When was the last time you pulled a Salesforce report and thought, “This looks incomplete”? That’s the biggest challenge most teams face today: the analytics gap created when your active Salesforce data grows quickly, you archive older records, and suddenly, your metrics don’t tell the full story.
This is where analytics on archived and unarchived Salesforce data becomes a game-changer. As Salesforce data analytics evolves, businesses want a single picture that blends live operational data with years of historical information. And thanks to solutions like DataArchiva, organizations can now unify archived data insights and real-time records to build richer dashboards, stronger forecasts, and more reliable decision-making. In multi-cloud, multi-org systems, this visibility becomes even more essential because data often exists across silos, objects, orgs, and storage layers.
Let’s break down exactly how this works, why it matters, and how you can leverage it in your Salesforce environment.
What You Can Analyze: Archived vs. Unarchived Salesforce Data
Archived and unarchived Salesforce data represent two distinct layers of information that organizations rely on every day. Most teams depend heavily on unarchived, live CRM data because it directly powers sales forecasting, customer operations, and real-time processes. But archived data holds something equally valuable: the long-term historical depth that makes analytics complete.
Understanding Archived Data in Salesforce
Archived data includes old, closed, or inactive records moved out of primary Salesforce storage. Organizations strive to reduce costs, improve performance, and meet long-term retention policies. These records may be stored in Big Objects, external databases, or platforms like DataArchiva.
Read the detailed Salesforce data archiving guide.
While archived datasets stay outside your primary storage layer, they still hold critical value for multi-year trend analysis, regulatory audits, lifecycle reporting, and operational decision-making. Most companies underestimate how much insight hides in historical data until they start building dashboards that compare 3, 5, or 10 years of performance.
How Unarchived Data Powers Real-Time Business Operations
Unarchived data lives within your active Salesforce org. These are daily operational records: opportunities in flight, open cases, customer activities, new leads, or real-time interactions. This is the “running engine” of your business, everything being updated, changed, or processed at this very moment.
This active dataset is what feeds your operational dashboards, sales pipelines, case queues, and forecasting charts. But because Salesforce orgs can’t hold infinite amounts of data, teams eventually archive older information to preserve performance.
Key Differences Between Archived and Unarchived Data
Unarchived data is used for current operations, while archived data forms the backbone of long-term analytics, compliance, and trend analysis. Combining the two brings visibility that standalone datasets cannot deliver.
- Only unarchived data = a snapshot.
- Archived + unarchived = the whole story.
How Salesforce Data Archiving Can Boost Your Analytics & AI Goals
The Growing Importance of Data Analytics in Salesforce
It is impossible to overlook today the growing importance of data analytics in Salesforce. As businesses generate massive volumes of operational, customer, and compliance-driven data, analytics has become the backbone of informed decision-making.
Modern teams rely on analytics not just to track performance but to predict future outcomes, understand behavioral patterns, and strengthen data-driven strategies. This shift has completely transformed how organizations treat their archived datasets, no longer as static storage but as a vital part of analytics and AI readiness.
Why Salesforce Data Analytics Matters Today
Businesses depend on Salesforce dashboards and reports for everything from revenue forecasting to customer segmentation. But if half your insights sit inside archived tables or external storage, your analysis becomes fragmented. Accurate decision-making needs both historical depth and real-time context.
When analytics tools pull only from unarchived datasets, the picture becomes incomplete, which is where unified analytics makes the biggest impact.
The Role of Historical and Active Data in Decision-Making
To get true archived data insights, companies need to look beyond snapshots of active data. Trends, seasonality, multi-year comparisons, and lifecycle analytics all depend on clean, accessible history. And the backbone of that is strong Salesforce data management coupled with scalable Salesforce data analytics that spans archived and unarchived datasets.
Challenges in Analyzing Archived Salesforce Data
Some reasons the analytics gap exists:
- Archived data stored separately (external systems, Big Objects, cloud).
- API limitations.
- Reporting gaps for historical datasets.
- Manual exports lead to inconsistent datasets.
- Performance issues when analyzing high-volume history in active orgs.
This complexity is exactly why platforms like DataArchiva simplify the entire pipeline.
Reduce Cost, Stay Compliant & Unlock Superior Data Experience in Salesforce with DataArchiva External Archiving
Combining Archived and Unarchived Data Using Salesforce Data Cloud
Unifying Data Sources Across CRM and External Systems
Salesforce Data Cloud merges CRM data with ERPs, product databases, billing systems, and archived data repositories.
How Salesforce Data Cloud Connects Archived and Live Data for Analytics
With Data Cloud, teams can build unified customer profiles that blend live Salesforce records with archived datasets stored in Big Objects or external platforms.
Real-Time Insights Powered by Data Cloud + DataArchiva Integration
When DataArchiva’s compliant and cost-efficient archiving is paired with Salesforce Data Cloud, organizations gain:
- Consolidated historical + real-time analytics
- Cross-channel visibility
- Real-time segmentation and predictions
- Cleaner-governed pipelines
How DataArchiva Enables Unified Salesforce Data Analytics
Achieving unified Salesforce analytics isn’t just about storing data, it’s about ensuring both active and archived datasets remain accessible, queryable, and analytics-ready. DataArchiva makes this possible by bringing structure, visibility, and performance efficiency to historical data, turning years of archived information into a powerful asset for reporting, forecasting, and AI-led insights.
Securing Your Data in the Age of AI: Best Practices for Salesforce Users
Native Archiving for Complete Data Visibility
Leveraging DataArchiva for Archiving and Analytics
Native archiving with DataArchiva ensures your live org remains lean and high-performing while still retaining years of business history. Because the archival process doesn’t interrupt ongoing operations, teams can continue working without downtime. Archived data becomes instantly accessible for reporting, trend analysis, and dashboards, removing the traditional barrier between “stored data” and “usable data.”
Powering Unified Analytics with Data Cloud and DataArchiva
When paired with Salesforce Data Cloud, DataArchiva’s archived datasets become fully unified with your active CRM data. Data Cloud pulls together both layers, live and historical, into a single analytical model that supports enterprise-wide visibility. This enables a true Customer 360 experience, where long-term timelines, multi-year transaction history, legacy customer interactions, and real-time activity all exist in one unified profile.
With this integration, organizations can run long-term revenue modeling, multi-year forecasting, and hybrid reporting without reloading archived records back into their primary org. Across sales, service, finance, and customer experience operations, DataCloud + DataArchiva provides a complete, uninterrupted view of the business.
Key Metrics & KPIs to Track Across Archived Data
Archived data becomes exceptionally valuable when stored and managed through DataArchiva because it extends your analytics beyond the limits of active Salesforce storage.
Enterprises can finally compare multi-year revenue patterns, seasonal sales cycles, and changing deal velocities using years of archived opportunity and account data. Product adoption curves and long-term customer value trends also become visible, supporting stronger strategic planning and forecasting.
Together, these capabilities turn archived data into a high-value enterprise asset—one that strengthens intelligence, improves forecasting accuracy, and gives leaders a complete view of historical and real-time operations.
Advanced Reporting & Visualization Techniques With DataArchiva
Modern Salesforce analytics requires more than basic dashboards; it demands blended datasets, multi-year visibility, and tools that can visualize trends across both active and archived information. DataArchiva enables this by ensuring archived Salesforce data remains structured, queryable, and directly usable inside reporting tools.
Building Unified Dashboards in Salesforce
With DataArchiva, dashboards can pull from both Big Objects (archived data) and active objects using SOQL, custom metadata, or Data Cloud unification. This lets teams build consolidated dashboards that reflect the full data lifecycle, from new leads to decade-long customer histories, without compromising org performance.
Using Tableau CRM and Einstein Analytics for Deep Insights
Because archived datasets remain within the Salesforce ecosystem, Tableau CRM and Einstein Analytics can seamlessly merge historical and real-time data. This enhances predictive models, strengthens trend dashboards, and improves AI-based insights by feeding algorithms with significantly larger and richer datasets spanning multiple years.
Integrating BI Tools for Cross-Platform Visualization
For organizations using Tableau, Power BI, or Zoho Analytics, DataArchiva simplifies cross-platform reporting. By keeping archived datasets structured and accessible, it becomes easy to build dashboards that visualize your entire Salesforce data estate, active, archived, and external, without relying on exports, re-ingestion, or performance-heavy queries.
These techniques help enterprises move from siloed reporting to true end-to-end visualization, creating a single analytical layer that spans all Salesforce datasets.
Conclusion
By leveraging analytics on archived and unarchived Salesforce data, businesses unlock a complete picture of both historical and real-time performance. Whether you’re focused on long-term forecasting, compliance, performance improvement, or simply better visibility, unified analytics is now a must-have strategy.
FAQs
Because combining both datasets gives a complete picture, real-time visibility plus long-term historical trends, for accurate decision-making.
Yes. With solutions like DataArchiva and Data Cloud, archived data remains accessible for reports, dashboards, and advanced analytics.
Archiving reduces org bloat, improves query speed, and makes analytics faster by keeping only active, relevant data in the primary org.
Not always. DataCloud enhances unification, but solutions like DataArchiva already allow analytics on archived records through Big Objects or external storage.
Yes. Features like X-AI from DataArchiva can uncover patterns, predictions, and insights from both archived and unarchived datasets, enabling deeper analytics.
Using analytics across both archived and active Salesforce data gives businesses a unified view of long-term history & current performance.
