SharePoint archiving moves less-frequently-accessed content to secondary storage while keeping it available when needed — other SharePoint sites, external storage, or a third-party tool. The point is keeping the active environment fast without losing anything.
In this post: Why it matters · The four approaches · Microsoft 365 Archive: the native option · When would you actually use this? · Best practices
Why it matters
- Performance: large, growing sites slow down search and queries — archiving keeps the active site responsive.
- Storage limits: SharePoint Online has quotas; archiving infrequently-used content avoids hitting them or paying for extra capacity.
- Compliance: regulated industries (healthcare, finance, legal) need older records stored securely and retrievable for audits.
- Cost: archiving to cheaper storage is less expensive than keeping everything in SharePoint indefinitely.
The four approaches
- Retention policies and labels (Microsoft 365 Compliance Center): automated retention/deletion rules, native to M365, best for compliance-driven archiving.
- Move to OneDrive or Teams: good for user-specific or departmental content that still needs frequent access, at lower cost than keeping it in the main site.
- External storage (Azure Blob, AWS S3): scalable and cost-effective for large enterprises, but requires integration work for smooth retrieval.
- Third-party tools (AvePoint, Metalogix, ShareGate): more advanced compliance/governance/automation features, at the cost of additional licensing.
Microsoft 365 Archive: the native option
Worth calling out separately from the four approaches above: Microsoft now ships a native cold-storage tier for this, so “external storage” or a third-party tool isn’t the only way to get real cost savings. Site-level archiving (generally available since May 2024) moves an entire site into a genuinely cold state — not just read-only, but invisible to search and browsing entirely, with a message shown to anyone who tries to reach it. It stops counting against the tenant’s active SharePoint storage quota and bills against separate Microsoft 365 Archive storage instead. Reactivating within 7 days of archiving is free and near-instant; after that window, restoring still works but isn’t guaranteed to be instant.
# Archive an entire site
Set-SPOSiteArchiveState -Identity https://contoso.sharepoint.com/sites/OldProject -ArchiveState Archived
# Reactivate it later
Set-SPOSiteArchiveState -Identity https://contoso.sharepoint.com/sites/OldProject -ArchiveState ReactivatingMicrosoft also began rolling out file-level archiving in preview — archiving individual files or folders within a site that otherwise stays fully active, instead of an all-or-nothing site decision. That’s the more surgical option when only part of a site’s content has actually gone cold. For most orgs, this native tier is worth evaluating before reaching for a third-party archiving product — it solves the same storage/cost problem without an extra vendor relationship.
Archiving moves less-frequently-accessed content to secondary storage while keeping it available when needed.
When would you actually use this?
- A hospital needs to retain patient records for 10 years for regulatory reasons — Compliance Center retention policies handle this automatically instead of relying on manual tracking.
- A large site with thousands of documents is getting slow — identifying and archiving inactive content (via a tool like AvePoint) is often the fix, not a SharePoint performance tweak.
- Storage costs are climbing and a lot of what’s stored is old financial reports or similar rarely-touched content — moving it to Azure Blob or AWS S3 cuts cost while keeping it accessible if actually needed.
Best practices
- Identify what actually needs archiving first — document age, access frequency, regulatory requirements, storage consumption — before picking a tool.
- Define retention policies and automate them via SharePoint’s own labels rather than manual tracking.
- Tag with metadata so archived content stays findable later — category, department, creation date.
- Automate the move itself with Power Automate rather than a manual, one-time cleanup that won’t be repeated.
- Audit archived content periodically to confirm it’s still secure and retrievable, not just “out of sight, out of mind.”
Hope it helps — shout in the comments if you get stuck.
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