Many things can happen that would corrupt your data tables and make your life miserable. It is vital that you regularly backup your data tables so that if a table becomes corrupted you can restore it with minimal down time. Ideally, the backup disk should not be on the same physical device as the original tables.
A second reason for archiving tables is that you may refer to the data so infrequently that you can move it off of your hard disk to free up space. For example, once Working tables have been transferred to a Master, you may not need to keep them on-line.
Finally, backups are a convenient method of transferring data between users or organizations.
WRDB provides an easy to use feature to backup and restore all Project tables. Select File | Project Management and then Backup to Archive or Restore from Archive.
See also Provider-Independent Text Files.