1. A method for preserving data associated with a document fragment of a source document to be deleted, comprising: (a) determining if the source document to be deleted includes a document fragment referenced by a fragment object located in an object repository, the document fragment including content data, the fragment object being referenced by a referencing document so as to provide the content data from the document fragment to the referencing document, the fragment object including a first set of data corresponding to the document fragment of the document to be; (b) replacing, in the fragment object, the first set of data corresponding to the document fragment of the source document to be deleted with the content data of the document fragment of the source document to be deleted when the source document to be deleted is determined to include the document fragment referenced by the fragment object; and (c) deleting the source document to be deleted after the first set of data, in the fragment object, corresponding to the document fragment of the source document to be deleted is replaced with the content data of the document fragment of the source document to be deleted.