Long Term Archive Best Practices

I am in a Health Care environment and need to keep logs for HIPAA compliance. Can anyone recommend any Best Practices for use of EventLogAnalyzer to perform this? I have about 90 servers in my environment, and need to consolidate logs for all of them and make it easy to access archived logs for review. Here are my main questions:

1) Should I use archiving, database backup, or both?
2) What is the best way to facilitate backing up to tape and how easy is it to restore and bring into the database later?
3) If archiving is part of the solution, how can I archive to a network drive?
4) If I delete archived zip files after backing up, the link is supposed to stay in the database, right?
5) If 4 is true, then as long as I restore from tape to the original location, I should be able to bring them back into the database, right?

I know that disk space usage, and the required time between archives will depend on how quickly the logs grow, so I just need some general direction.

Thanks!