Comment by buchanae

In my experience, archived objects are almost never accessed, and if they are, it's within a few hours or days of deletion, which leaves a fairly small chance that schema changes will have a significant impact on restoring any archived object. If you pair that with "best-effort" tooling that restores objects by calling standard "create" APIs, perhaps it's fairly safe to _not_ deal with schema changes.

Of course, as always, it depends on the system and how the archive is used. That's just my experience. I can imagine that if there are more tools or features built around the archive, the situation might be different.

I think maintaining schema changes and migrations on archived objects can be tricky in its own ways, even kept in the live tables with an 'archived_at' column, especially when objects span multiple tables with relationships. I've worked on migrations where really old archived objects just didn't make sense anymore in the new data model, and figuring out a safe migration became a difficult, error-prone project.