Understanding Geodatabase Archiving and H tables in ArcSDE?

Try disabling archiving before you delete anything. When you disable archiving, you should get a message that gives you an option to keep or discard the history (the _H table). If you keep it, then it becomes a regular ol' feature class. The _H tables track the history of changes to the default version, as you make edits to a feature class that has archiving enabled. The _H1 tables likely got created when you re-created something in the archiving enabled feature dataset. In this case, the geodatabase first tried to create the _H table, saw that a table with that name already existed, and so added the suffix 1 to it. If you repeated the set of operations, you would end up with _H2 tables, and so on.

Here is my first starting point:

• understanding archiving 9.3
• understanding archiving 10.0
• understanding archiving 10.1

I posted all three because there is something good in each one.

Also, here is a really old 2006 document that shows not much has changed with archiving.

• 9.3 archive tables in sql server
• 10.0 System table in sql server

After reading quite a bit of this. I registered my feature dataset as versioned, disabled archiving, unregistered my dataset as versioned, and then deleted my _H historical tables.