An archive system is provided for long term storage of large amounts of data that is particularly suited for multi-year storage of medical data such as cardiac images, patient demographics and reports. One or more digital versatile disks (DVDs) may be employed as the storage media. In the archival process, all of the data for a particular patient, procedure or study is stored and uniquely identified within one DVD. Each DVD may have an executable program stored thereon for independently accessing the archived data from the selected DVD. Before the DVD is recorded, the data to be archived is segmented into a plurality of information groups where each group is based on data for the particular patient, procedure or study. Then, the DVD is reviewed to determine whether a sufficient amount of storage space is present to ensure that the information group will be entirely stored within one DVD.