I've been using Org Mode for close to 10 years now, and I never grokked how the archiving is supposed to be used. You can browse the archive files for your data, and the automatically added metadata give some context as to where it was located, but AFAIK you can't rebuild an old version of an .org file from the archive. So because of that, if I care about the whole structural history of an org file, I stick it in a git repository.