"If you wish to continue this discussion with me, please do so by email.  I would imagine all the other users of this board are a little bored with this topic."

Yeh...I am getting a wee bit bored of the topic myself...so why I’d want to email about it is another matter, unless I like having my head bit off, which I don’t. :)  I merely mentioned that we don’t need the "Horse Power" that your used to dealing with with the 90’000 hits.  NOT that you don’t know what your talking about.  :) If messages are archived in text format only then I DO know that they should take up less KB’s where storage is concerned.  How often are people using archives?  I would have thought not as much as the board itself.  I do know that when there are e are a lot of messages on the first page of a board it can take a while to load...that is why mine is tweaked to only take messages on the first page of up to 50 hours or so unless people set their own preferences to something like 50 weeks.    People still can check over the archives to a certain point, but I don’t keep them after a certain length of time they are lost.  

I don’t see the sense in keeping them any longer than two years.  Most topics are rehashed time after time and I think that there is always someone to answer something anyway.