As the saying goes, "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." Administrators are well advised to archive data before ailing performance becomes a characteristic of their SAP environment. SAP Data Archiving enables you to keep the size of your database under control over the long term, ensuring improved system availability and performance, and more efficient use of IT resources such as hard disks, CPUs, and networks. This article describes how SAP's Archive Development Kit (ADK) works, the ways in which you interact with it, and how to plan for and execute archiving and post-archiving activities. It will bring newcomers up to speed very quickly, and provides plenty of useful information for those already well versed in the fundamentals. Threaded throughout the article are suggestions and tips about how best to wield SAP ADK technology, particularly with regard to FI_DOCUMNT, one of the most commonly used and therefore most important archiving objects.