Microsoft 365 Archives in a Practical Test

Microsoft 365 Archive enables archiving entire SharePoint sites and promises lower storage costs. But how high is the real savings potential - and under what conditions does the solution work in practice? This article analyzes the possible uses and limitations of Microsoft 365 Archive and explains why the archiving approach is crucial for the economic effect.

Many organizations face constantly growing data volumes in SharePoint Online. As a central platform for collaboration and document management, storage requirements often grow faster than the underlying Governance structures. Clear rules for use, structure, and life cycles are usually missing.

Microsoft 365 Archive can help to reduce costs in such scenarios - but only if specific requirements are met. Inactive or closed sites must be clearly identifiable. Usage scenarios should be clearly separated, and lifecycles should be defined in a binding manner.

Only when these framework conditions are in place does the removal of sites from active storage have a measurable economic effect.

SharePoint Online provides a basic storage quota per client. If this is exceeded, additional costs are incurred for further storage quota. A rough guide is 10 GB of SharePoint storage per user license.

Microsoft 365 Archive starts at precisely this point: Rarely used or inactive SharePoint sites are removed from the active storage and transferred to an archive status. The amount of productive memory used is reduced accordingly.

Archived sites are billed at lower archive storage conditions than active SharePoint sites. This reduces running costs without deleting or permanently removing content.

The technical principle of Microsoft 365 Archive is deliberately kept simple. Complete SharePoint sites are moved from active operation to an archive status. The content remains complete and unchanged.

Archived sites remain within the Microsoft 365 environment, but are no longer directly accessible to end users. Documents, metadata, versions, and authorizations remain entirely intact.

Thanks to the archive status, these sites cause lower storage costs than active SharePoint sites – without data loss or content changes.

The decision on archiving and reactivation lies entirely with the IT administration. Administrators analyze the use of SharePoint sites and identify suitable candidates, for example, after project completion or in the event of prolonged inactivity.

Archiving is performed via the Microsoft 365 Admin Center or PowerShell commands. Administrators can select specific sites for archiving and start the process. In addition, rules can be defined to implement the process partially or fully automatically and control it consistently.

If an archived SharePoint site is needed again – for example, for follow-up projects, audits, or legal reviews – it can be reactivated at any time. It can also be restored via the Admin Center or automated workflows.

After reactivation, the site is available again in active storage with all content and authorizations as if it had never been archived.

Since archiving and recovery in Microsoft 365 Archive are reserved exclusively for administrators, the question often arises in practice how these processes can be at least partially automated or made usable for specialist departments.

Direct self-service archiving by end users is not supported in Microsoft 365 Archive. Nevertheless, companies can use organizational or technical approaches to make archiving processes more efficient and scalable, for example, by:

• Connection to the IT helpdesk or a ticket system via which archiving and reactivation requests are made
• Provision of standardized application forms, for instance, via Microsoft Forms
• Partially or fully automated workflows, for example, with Power Automate, to initiate administrative archiving processes

In addition, the expiration process of Microsoft 365 groups in Entra ID can be used to control group and site lifecycles based on time and to systematically identify potential archiving candidates.

Classification:
These approaches improve process control, but do not replace genuine self-service archiving at the content level. The responsibility for archiving and restoration remains with the IT administration.

The economic benefits of the archiving solution are obvious and can be relatively easily translated into a return on investment (ROI) calculation. However, the biggest challenge of this solution lies within the company's SharePoint or Microsoft Teams information architecture.

If SharePoint sites or teams are structured, assigned to use cases such as projects, and have a well-thought-out lifecycle, they are ideal for archiving with Microsoft 365 Archive.

Regular analyses of various Microsoft 365 environments show a clear picture. In almost all cases, the savings potential depends heavily on the level at which archiving takes place. If you compare Microsoft 365 archives at the site level with a document-based view, there are clear differences:

• If only completely inactive SharePoint and Teams sites are considered, i.e., sites with no changes for more than twelve months, there is often a savings potential of around 2 terabytes.
• If, on the other hand, all documents that have not been changed for several years are taken into account, the identifiable savings potential often increases many times over. In individual analyses, a volume of around 20 terabytes was identified, and therefore, a factor of around ten compared to the site-based approach.

In addition, with Microsoft 365 Archive, an entire SharePoint site must always be reactivated - even if only a single document is required. This fact limits the practical benefits, particularly in search and ad hoc scenarios.