[afiori]

It will likely apply, still I imagine that they can simply pretend it does not.

My intuition is that archiving data for long term historical use is different from datamining a [meta]data to maximize invasion of privacy. Also there is a difference in accessibility, stored inside a glacier very few people are going to actually read it.

I believe that if mass complaints from all over the EU emerged it would be a different story. But this does not look like the activities the GDPR was created for

[scrollaway]

It will absolutely not apply. GDPR has provisions both for archival AND for cases where the removal etc requests are deemed unreasonable.