Data archives are built to last a lifetime. More than a lifetime. They are in place to protect all the data that man and machine create. And yet, today, the archiving storage technology itself is rushing ever faster into obsolesce and every year it becomes more difficult to move this Archived information into the next generation of storage and support expanding requirements for accessibility. The evolution of storage media used to be measured in years, now it is measured in months. So how do you plan for migrating exponentially increasing amounts of data [1] when the subsequent data migration may have to begin even before the current migration is complete?Planning a tiered data storage paradigm shift was never easy even when there was sufficient time to review options; to select the proper next step in what must be a never ending cycle of legacy data protection. But when time is short (and growing shorter), there must be migration strategies and methods established to provide not only for the next migration, but also setting the stage for all subsequent migrations. Considering strategies for migrating “like-technologies”, such as disk-to-disk or server-to-server, can often be staggered to avoid a more massive disruptive migration.But when a migration requires the core Data Management Archive Software (DMAS) technology be replaced, the impacts ripple across the total tiered data architecture with the potential to impact the user community relying on that data.This paper explores aspects of strategies about how a Tiered Data Management Environment (TDME) facing the prospect of replacing the underlying DMAS should design an approach for converting and re-casting the archive.