The archive version feature enables you to maintain a history of saved unique recipe revisions. This also provides the advantage of modifying a recipe revision and alternate without creating a new revision.
How this functionality works depends on how you have set up the manufacturing rules for your site.
Every time you do a change in a recipe structure that triggers a new version, you can decide if you want to save the version in the archive. This is done by selecting Archive Recipe When Changed in Site/Manufacturing. If you have not selected this, every time you do a change in the recipe structure and try to save the changes you need to answer if you want to archive the version. The changes that enable saving an archive version are changes in the component part number, quantity changes for the recipe or a component part in the recipe structure.
The archive version feature is not dependant on the status of the structure.
If you select to archive a new version and the rules specified in Site get you a new revision, this will be the archived version 1 for this specific revision and alternate.