As time passes, we collect ever increasing volumes of content. At the same time our understanding of the content we have decreases as people come and go from our organisation, projects are completed, activities and 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 high reactivation costs.

Archiving is a long game. This means we need to think carefully about our how we do it. There are compliance needs and costs to consider, and practical aspects such as recovery process. We need to consider the lifetime of the solution and how this impacts us when it reaches end of life.

Understanding the lifetime costs of the archiving solution should include:

•            Storage costs now

•            Future storage costs (is the archiving growing with time?)

•            Reactivating costs

•            The unit size for reactivation

Let’s consider for a moment a classic SharePoint site with content stored in subsites. Microsoft 365 Archive requires the entire site collection to be reactivated, even if you just want to recover one document. The cost is $US0.60/GB, so this could get expensive very quickly if you need to do multiple restores and the site collection is large.

Flattening the subsites into modern sites before archiving, will allow you to do more granular restores. You should also consider which of the sites are archived and which ones are left active. Balance the size of the site with the likelihood the content will be needed.

The timing of archiving is another factor. Archiving immediately after decommissioning or migrating a site, might close the project but could introduce significant operating costs if you need to do frequent restores. Wait until the site is cold is likely to be lower cost than archiving a site that is still warm.

Consider:

•            Flattening subsites to modern to make reactivations more granular and smaller

•            Emptying recycle bins (if they contain a lot of content)

•            Finding large items that aren’t required in the archive e.g. video

•            Is their content in the site that is likely to be needed? Can it be moved?

•            The retention policy

•            Is this site a delete rather than keep

•            why is it you are archiving this site?

Microsoft 365 Archiving, archives SharePoint sites, other elements of an M365 Group or Team are not archived. Consider how you will manage that content as part of the strategy. Users can still access posts but do not have access to file content, stored in the Team’s SharePoint site. Note that Teams Archiving is also available, but this feature doesn’t move SharePoint content to lower costs storage.

Another thing to note in the costs for Microsoft 365 Archive, is that the lower cost for storage only applies after you have used the storage allocated to SharePoint in your tenant. If you are below the storage limit the consider making the site read only and removing access rather than Archiving. This means you have zero reactivation cost.

It is important to evaluate the archiving tool. Microsoft 365 Archive retains the site structure, permissions and adheres to retention policies, while other solutions move documents out to another storage location and may focus on just the content and other SharePoint configuration. There are pro’s and con’s, so look carefully at features, duration of the retention, frequency of reactivation and lifetime cost of the solution.

In conclusion, you should plan your approach to using Microsoft 365 Archive, considering the size of the content, site structure and likelihood of reactivating archived sites.