How would you design a data archiving strategy for an org approaching its storage limit?

Storage is the trigger, but the design has to start with policy, not with tooling:

1. Establish retention first: How long must each object be retained, who owns that decision, and what triggers a legal hold? Until that is agreed, any archive design is guesswork and probably not defensible to an auditor.
2. Profile the data: Find where the volume actually is. It is usually one or two objects plus attachments and field history — not evenly spread. This tells you where effort pays off.
3. Choose the tier per dataset: Frequently read recent data stays in the transactional object. Rarely read but retained data goes to a Big Object or an external archive surfaced through Salesforce Connect. Data past retention and free of legal hold is deleted.
4. Preserve access: Whatever the destination, define how a steward retrieves an archived record during an audit and how long that takes. An archive nobody can query is a liability.
5. Execute safely: Reconcile counts between source and archive before deleting anything, use Bulk API hard delete so the Recycle Bin does not hold the volume, and run it in off-peak windows in controlled batches.
6. Make it recurring: A one-off purge buys eighteen months. A scheduled job with a documented policy and monitoring is the actual deliverable.