The Corporate File Manager facilitates the offlining / onlining of project or sub-project data sets throughout the lifecycle of the project. The physical location of project data often varies over the lifecycle, therefore the Corporate File Manager incorporates awareness to accommodate the very nature of data residing on various hardware platforms over time. Furthermore, customers and users are often reluctant to archive of their data. To alleviate this concern, customers and users are provided a project level interface which enables them to explicitly control data archive and retrieval operations. The Corporate File Manager provides a unified view of data across physical data locations, including the archive.The exposure of data cost within the interface provides the business incentive and motivation for efficient data archival or demotion.