There is a well established IT literature and procedures for archiving databases for backup and recovery. For more information about database backup and recovery refer to the online help:

Geographic information has some special characteristics that provide challenges for incremental or partial archiving.  Because individual GI records are usually closely linked to other records (e.g. adjacent land parcels share common boundaries, and splitting a parcel creates two or more sub-parcels) both the original data and the relationships between the data need to be archived.

At the 9.2 release, geodatabase archiving functionality was introduced in the multi-user geodatabase. Datasets can be enabled for archiving in a framework that provides the mechanism to capture all data changes in the default version of the geodatabase by preserving the transactional history as an additional archive class. ArcGIS applies transaction time when changes are saved or posted to the default version to record the moment of change to the geodatabase.

Geodatabase archiving introduces a historical version. A historical version represents the geodatabase as it was at a moment in time and provides a read-only view of the geodatabase for a particular given moment. You can connect to a historical version based on a predefined historical marker or a specified moment in time that you pick from a calendar. A historical marker is a named moment in time that you can create.