Archive is no storage box. It refers to every document under one's responsibility. Not all documents are rendered public. In that case, the archives may contain a catalogue of published documents and another one of internal documents. The hierarchy refines itself : archivists love terminology.
This sole distinction should suffice to make this point : a blog's archive is not the same as the site's archives. Note the singular and the plural. Both uses denotes different concepts, or maybe different kinds of entities. A list of published documents is often related by topic, or by perspective, or by author. The overall complex of documents is often unrelated, except by the fact that they reside in one site.
This makes sense from the historical standpoint, as archives are documents from old institutions. So the first principle of archivistics is to keep others' documents as they were found. No one messes with others' mess, for the simple reason that no one messes with his own mess. Keeping order and flushing disorder is a travesty that should be kept to collectors only.
Without version control, there are no archives that can be humanly maintained. Keeping a copy as a whole remains the only way to preserve one's information architecture, both in concept and in principle. Even then, the universe expands, reaches entropy, and the information gets lost in the secondary exits.
So let's hope God kept a good backup of His bootstrapping program.
