The Active Archive Alliance is a trade association that promotes a method of tiered storage. This method provides users access to data across a virtual file system that migrates data between multiple storage systems and media types including solid-state drive/flash, hard disk drives, magnetic tape, optical disk, and cloud. The result of an active archive implementation is that data can be stored on the most appropriate media type for the given retention and restoration requirements of that data. This allows less time sensitive or infrequently accessed data to be stored on less expensive media and eliminates the need for an administrator to manually migrate data between storage systems. Additionally, since storage systems such as tape libraries have low power consumption, the operational ex