A method, apparatus, and article of manufacture implementing the method, transparently archives data. One or more data sources store data. A first data mover moves a first subset of data from the one or more data sources to a first federated archive in accordance with a first set of rules.In another aspect of the invention, a query is processed to retrieve a second subset of data, and a portion of the second subset of data is retrieved from the first federated archive. In yet another aspect of the invention, the processing of the query determines whether any data that would satisfy the query is stored in the first federated archive.