Abstract: A method and system to store and retrieve archival data and indefinitely storing the data is disclosed. By using caches and large volumes of commodity disk drives controlled in a dynamic or scheduled way, power consumption of the archive system is reduced. Archive data is transferred to the archive facility via a channel, such as electronic or physical transportation, depending on a set of customer service level parameters. Archived data is replicated to a second facility to guard against multiple device failures or site disasters. The archived data is protected from erasure by both keeping the media predominantly unpowered and disabling writing to the media once it has been filled to capacity. The system provides access to indexable host and customer-specific metadata across the entire infrastructure without powering the media. All customer archive data is segregated from all other data by residing on per customer dedicated media.