How do you handle schema drift?

The data archive serialized the schema of the deleted object representative the schema in that point in time.

But fast-forward some schema changes, now your system has to migrate the archived objects to the current schema?

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.