This Guide is mainly concerned with archiving and documentation of geophysical data once a project has been completed. While a project is ongoing it is of course sensible to generate all information and data with the future Archive already in mind and in this respect the Guide will also be relevant to ongoing projects. Obviously data backup is essential during this process even before the final Archive is created and some advice on this can be found in ‘Planning for the Creation of Digital Data‘. This is not the main focus of this Guide, however, where the Archive and its deposition to an Archiving Body is more than just data backup.