When turning off Archiving on a feature class, Archiving is also turned off on related tables and feature classes.
In my case I had a table with Archiving turned on and Versioning turned Off. This table only had a few records in the Archive. However, the table had a relationship class with a feature class with an a archive of 600k records going back 9 years.
I wanted to turn on Versioning on the table. To do that, I had to turn off Archiving. I didn't preserve the archive because it only had a few records. Apparently this action also turned off Archiving in the related feature class and the history table was deleted.
I would have liked to have received a warning on the implications of my action: Warning: you are also turning off Versioning in related tables (and are deleting the archive).
