Don't turn off archiving in related feature classes

[LaurensKusse_hhdelfland]

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 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.

Idea: don't turn off archiving in related tables and feature class

ps as I understood from Esri Support, this behavior was implemented in ArcGIS Pro. In ArcMap it was possible to turn off archiving in one feature class and not turning it off in the related feature class.

[CalvinHarmin]

That's really unfortunate that there was no warning for you. I know that when archiving is purposefully disabled, you get the option to 'Preserve' the history table or delete it. I wonder if it created a <layername>_H object in your geodatabase that could still be used for historical purposes (although can't be 'restored' as the active Historical table). But it seems your notes indicate that since you chose 'dont preserve' the related historical table, so it also fully deleted the one you care about?

[LaurensKusse_hhdelfland]

That's correct. I choose not to preserve the one I didn't care about. And then it also deleted the one I did care about. So there are no <layername>_H objects visible. 

But we are going to restore the database to a temporary database. I will copy the _H object to a new feature class in the original database. Then we still have the history although not in the original archive table.

[CalvinHarmin]

That makes sense. It feels like the whole archiving and historical management has not gotten any love in a couple decades. I think there could be a lot more helpful tools that could be made to improve management and usefulness of it.