Qualified electronic archiving service

The eIDAS trust service that keeps documents readable and unaltered: qualified archiving gives a presumption of integrity and accurate origin.

One of the trust services eIDAS added in its 2024 revision: a service that preserves electronic data and documents so they remain readable and demonstrably unchanged over a long period. Article 45i gives the qualified version its value: data preserved with a qualified electronic archiving service enjoy the presumption of their integrity and of the accuracy of their origin for the duration of the preservation period.

Article 45j sets the requirements. The service must be provided by a QTSP; it must use procedures and technologies that keep data durable and legible beyond the technological validity period and at least throughout the legal or contractual preservation period, while maintaining integrity and the accuracy of origin; and it must safeguard the material against loss and alteration, with the exception of changes to the medium or the electronic format.

That last exception is what makes it an archiving service rather than a storage bucket: migrating a file to a format that can still be opened in fifteen years is allowed, losing the evidence in the process is not. Note the neighbour it is often confused with. Article 34 describes a qualified preservation service for qualified electronic signatures, which keeps a signature trustworthy beyond its technological validity - the object there is the signature. An archiving service preserves the documents and data themselves. Both lean on the same machinery of timestamps and long-term validation.