Microsoft 365 Archive is a SharePoint Premium feature to help reduce SharePoint Online storage costs. SharePoint Administrators can select sites and archive them from the Admin Portal.
When a site is archived, access to the content in the site is removed making it inaccessible to end users. Purview continues to manage retention, content sensitivity and eDiscovery on archived sites.
How Archiving works
In the SharePoint Admin Portal, go into the Active Sites list and select the site(s) you want to archive and choose Archive.
You will be asked to confirm and acknowledge the 7 day grace period for free reactivation. Note that if you need to reactive a site after 7 days there is a cost per GB of data (the total size of the site).
If your site is associated with a Microsoft 365 Group, other features including the mailbox and Teams will still be available. It is only the attached SharePoint site that is actually archived. Clicking a link that takes you to the SharePoint content results in a nice message (including a kitten) telling you the site has been archived.
Archived content is retained in the Search index, and appear in Search results. This makes it archived content discoverable. Clicking on an archived item shows the archived content message above.
In the Admin Portal, the Archived Sites list shows all archived sites. The Administrator can see details of the site including the size of the site to estimate restore costs.
The archived site retains it structure, content and metadata. This is great because if you need to bring the site back, it will be just as it was when it was archived. Archiving and reactivating the site is very quick!
There isn’t a specific place to record details of why the site was archived so it is a good idea to put detail into the description field to help identify the site again when someone asks for a reactivation in several years time.
The big benefit of Microsoft 365 Archive is the reduced storage cost, $US0.05 / GB / Month vs $US0.20 / GB / Month for additional SharePoint Online storage. You only pay for storage if you go over the SharePoint storage you have in your tenant.
Microsoft does charges $US0.60 / GB to restore. Factor this into the decision on archive. If it is a very large site and you are likely to need it, then perhaps keep it live until the likelihood of reactivation is low.
The FAQ’s for the preview states the following features are coming later in 2024:
- End user content search
- File level archiving
- GCC rollout
If you are buying a lot of additional storage, then Microsoft 365 Archive might be for you. It is in public preview currently, so check the notes before proceeding as there are some limitations.
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[…] focus change etc. This can result in the need to purchase more storage capacity in Microsoft 365. Microsoft 365 Archive helps reduce the cost, but you need to plan the approach to avoid costly reactivation […]
Hi Steve, have you tried searching for a document that was stored in an archived site? Microsoft documentation makes it sound like this should still work, but it’s not for me. I had a call with Microsoft support where they told me it doesn’t work that way, even though the documentation says specifically that archived content should be searchable by admins.
The content should be discoverable via Search. If it isn’t then I think you may need to log a support ticket with Microsoft via the Admin Portal.