Spontaneous Archiving?

[847396730]

Hello!  I recently copied (ArcCatalog right-click > Copy > Paste) three feature classes from my test ArcSDE geodatabase to my production ArcSDE geodatabase.  This is a standard process--there aren't usually any surprises.  This time, however, each of the three feature classes copied into production successfully, and each now has its own archiving (_H) feature class.  I did not Enable Archiving on either the source or destination feature classes.  There are no archiving feature classes in the test environment.  When I right-click > Manage the feature classes, the option to Disable Archiving is greyed-out, but the option to Enable Archiving is available, indicating that Archiving is not enabled.

A last note: archiving tables are not supposed to be visible in ArcCatalog, but rather only from your DBMS manager (in my case, SQL Server Management Studio). But these mystery archiving feature classes are visible in ArcCatalog. 

What is going on?

Thank you!

ArcGIS Desktop v10.2
ArcSDE v10.0

[ForrestJones]

Hi Marianne,

Is it possible that the feature classes were in the production geodatabase with archiving enabled before and then were deleted? If so, the _H tables would remain in the geodatabase unless specifically deleted after the original delete of the feature classes. Then when copying in the data again, the _H tables would appear in the list of tables and not actually be the _H tables of the newly copied feature classes.

[847396730]

Hello, and thank you for the response.  No, these feature classes have never had archiving enabled.  In this case, the team made a mistake, and the process had to be repeated.  After deleting these feature classes, modifying the source data, and re-pasting, the archiving classes did not reappear.  It will remain a mystery unless it happens again--I never was able to replicate the problem.