Why shouldn't this information be gleaned from the applicable policy document?

There should be some improvements to archiving in general. eg.

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Archiving should be cluster aware too. (you can archive to either the primary archive server or the backup archive server if you have one) . Or archive to a local replica of your archive if you're working locally....

@1 Well, many companies have a separate Domino server for their archives, as you know. Deciding whether to cluster that data is a difficult decision for some shops, due to the low usage frequency and expense in maintaining a separate massive data store, rather than just enabling transaction logging for quick restarts and backing-up the data post archive agent running.

Less concerned about the cluster issues here, and more about knowing easily whether a user is using a local archive, perhaps against company policy (yes, policies can help here, but not all shops use them properly). This would be a good fail-safe IMHO.

Don't forget it is possible to have more than one archive.
Especially in environments where users are allowed to modify their own archiving settings (like local archiving).

@3 Correct...some environments do not lock-down these settings and can users could potentially have an archive for every day on the calendar (an exaggeration, but illustrates the risk).

To combat this matter, the person document should have a running list similar to the Notes client version history for each version...so whenever a user changes their archive rules, the file name and location (if changed in any way), get pushed up to their person document for tracking.

Still might not catch everything, but would allow for decent data mining of archive usage.

I understand that we can have multiple archives, but as process, it seems logical to define a primary and store it's location in the same place as the rest of the "person" info. That way it's available without having to do complicated mail file parsing.