"A hard drive that is left in the freezer for 24 hours and then quickly inserted back into your machine can make a recovery. Or at least long enough to back things up before it says adios forever."
Archived Links don't appear on your main links page, but you can still find them using tags or search. If the link is public, other people can still find it, too.
If you're posting many links, this lets you clean up your link list without deleting anything.
