How to Archive a SharePoint Site Without Losing the Rules
11 October 2026
"Archive a SharePoint site" means at least three different things, and the argument in most organisations is really about which one. It can mean freeing storage. It can mean stopping people editing. It can mean keeping the content as evidence for a defined number of years. The steps are different for each, and doing the first while believing you did the third is the expensive mistake.
What Microsoft 365 Archive does
Microsoft 365 Archive moves inactive data into a cold storage tier inside SharePoint. According to Microsoft's own documentation, archived content keeps the same searchability, security and compliance standards; a site retains all of its metadata and permissions when it is reactivated; full content search still works through Purview Content Search, end-user search and eDiscovery, though export of archived content can take longer. Billing is pay as you go, configured in the admin centre.
Read that carefully and the unit becomes obvious: it operates on sites. You archive a whole site, it stops being directly accessible, and you pay for the storage it consumes. That is an excellent answer to a tenant full of dormant team sites. It is not an answer to "how long must this contract be kept, and who signs when it goes".
Four options, and when each is right
1. Microsoft 365 Archive
Right when the problem is storage and dormancy, and when you may want the site back intact. Costs money per consumption, keeps search, needs no migration.
2. Read-only lock
Right when people must still read the site daily but nobody should change it. Cheapest option, frees nothing, and does not help with retention at all.
3. Export and delete
Right when the content genuinely has no further use and something outside SharePoint holds whatever must be kept. The trap is doing it in the opposite order: deleting first and discovering afterwards that three cases on that site were still under a retention term.
4. Move the records into a records system
Right when the site holds things that have to be kept for a defined period and proved later. Here the unit stops being the site and becomes the case, which is the whole point.
These are not exclusive. The common arrangement is option four for the handful of cases that matter and option one for everything else on the same site.
Retention is a separate decision from storage
This is where most SharePoint archiving projects quietly fail. Cold storage answers where the bytes sit. It does not answer how long each item must be kept, who may see it in the meantime, or what evidence exists when it is finally destroyed. In Microsoft's own stack those questions live in Purview retention policies, which is a different product with a different unit of work.
The practical consequence: archive the site for storage reasons whenever you like, and decide retention separately, per case, before you do. Otherwise the term lives in somebody's head and the site lives in cold storage, and neither knows about the other.
What to do before you archive anything
- Find out whether anything on the site is under a term. Contracts, personnel files and anything connected to an audit or a dispute. If the answer is "probably not", that is not an answer.
- Check for legal hold. A site under hold should not be archived, moved or deleted until the hold is lifted by somebody with the authority to lift it.
- Write down who asked. Archiving is reversible with option one and not with option three, and in six months somebody will ask who decided.
- Check what links to it. Other sites, Teams channels and documents often point at files on the site being archived.
- Decide what happens to the permissions. They are preserved on reactivation, but the people in them may have left.
Where this sits in our products
If the problem is dormant sites, use Microsoft's own tool: it does that job and we do not duplicate it. If the problem is that records need terms, a file plan and disposal evidence, that layer is our SharePoint archiving solution, working on top of document management for Microsoft 365. Where records also live outside SharePoint, the same rules extend through records management software and document archiving software.
FAQ
Can an archived SharePoint site be restored? With Microsoft 365 Archive, yes: Microsoft documents that a site keeps its metadata and permissions on reactivation. With export and delete, no, which is why the order of operations matters.
Is archived content still searchable? Microsoft states that full content search works for Purview Content Search, end-user search and eDiscovery, and that exporting archived content may take longer. The site itself is not directly accessible while archived.
Does archiving a site satisfy a retention requirement? No. Storage tier and retention term are different decisions. A site can sit in cold storage with no term attached to anything on it, which is exactly the state an auditor will find uncomfortable.
What happens to a site that is under legal hold? Leave it alone until the hold is lifted. The whole purpose of a hold is to stop the normal lifecycle, and archiving is part of the normal lifecycle.
Related reading. how to write a retention policy, what document archiving is, the six stages of a document.
Work out which of the four you actually need. Talk to us and we will go through one real site with you rather than a sample tenant.
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