SharePoint archives: Smarter inactive site management

Whether for compliance or just for reference purposes, there are plenty of reasons not to delete an old SharePoint site. But storage is expensive, and if you never get rid of inactive sites, costs will soon mount up.

That’s where Microsoft 365 Archive comes in, helping you reduce costs by moving inactive sites to low-cost, read-only storage. With a SharePoint archive, admins can reactivate the site when it’s needed again. Compliance tools like Purview and Discovery can still discover the content while preserving sites under the same security and compliance standards you applied when you created them.

In this guide, we demonstrate how to reduce clutter, optimize your storage, and reduce costs using SharePoint archives.

What Microsoft 365 Archive actually does

Microsoft 365 Archive is a M365-native solution that lets you move entire SharePoint Online sites into low-cost, read-only storage. Once you’ve identified an inactive site, the platform helps you remove it from your main storage servers while ensuring you still have access when needed. 

Note: Microsoft 365 Archive does not identify inactive sites itself. The decision on what to archive is entirely IT admin-driven.

There are several steps to the archiving process, including:

• The site enters a cold state: Unlike a standard read-only site, an archived site is completely inaccessible to end users. They’ll no longer see the site in search results or be able to browse its content. Instead, they’ll see a message stating the site has been archived.
• All content, lists, and metadata are preserved: While Microsoft 365 Archive supports preservation at the site level, you can’t currently use the platform for individual files, lists, or libraries. However, Microsoft has announced that file-level archiving will be available by mid-2026.
• Permission and access structures are carried over. While no one will be able to modify its content or settings, the site will retain any permission or access configurations it had when it was active.
• Compliance stays intact, but visibility changes: One of the biggest perks for IT is that archived sites remain fully discoverable for eDiscovery and legal holds within the Microsoft Purview compliance portal. But to keep the tenant clean, end users will no longer see this content in their daily search results or via M365 Copilot.

Archiving inactive sites vs. deleting

It might appear more straightforward to just delete any inactive sites. While this would certainly free up storage space, deleting outdated content assumes you will never need it again, which is often not the case. A site’s content could be useful for a future project, or you might need to include it in a compliance audit.

Archiving inactive sites reduces storage costs and helps you maintain a clean, organized environment while ensuring accessibility and supporting governance. Many teams also rely on third-party SharePoint archiving solutions to streamline the process by surfacing inactive workspaces, helping them identify which sites to archive.

How to archive in SharePoint using Microsoft 365 Archive

There are two main methods of archiving SharePoint sites. Be aware that you’ll need to be a SharePoint Administrator or a Global Administrator to control Microsoft 365 Archive.

Archiving sites with SharePoint Admin Center

SharePoint Admin Center is the simplest and most accessible way to manage inactive sites using Microsoft 365 Archive. 

From the Active sites page, administrators can archive both group-connected and non–group-connected SharePoint sites. When a site is archived, it stops consuming active SharePoint storage quota and begins using Microsoft 365 Archive storage instead.

Archived sites are not accessible to users until they are reactivated, but their data, permissions, and compliance settings (such as retention and eDiscovery) remain preserved. That’s why incorporating this step into a broader lifecycle management plan is so important. 

This process grants you more control over your SharePoint sites and reduces storage costs without requiring you to delete content. If you’re not sure where to start, you can use out-of-the-box SharePoint usage reports to identify sites that have gone inactive.  If you need that content again later, an admin can reactivate the site from the SharePoint admin center—just keep in mind the reactivation process can take up to 24 hours to complete.

Archiving sites using PowerShell

PowerShell can be a great option if you’re dealing with lots of scripted or repeatable administrative tasks. Rather than being a different archiving method, PowerShell is simply another way to initiate the process. 

You can preserve or reactivate sites in bulk using the PowerShell cmdlet Set-SPOSiteArchiveState. If you’re carrying out a major cleanup of your SharePoint environment, PowerShell is a flexible approach that can save you a lot of time. That said, it also comes with a steep, more technical learning curve than SharePoint Admin Center.

Microsoft 365 Archive limitations

Archiving is, by design, largely manual for most admins. By itself, Microsoft 365 Archive only supports site-level archiving without built-in logic to inactive sites. But if you’re looking to scale, site lifecycle management (part of SharePoint Advanced Management) can be used to automate and orchestrate the move to the archive tier based on admin-defined policies. Without that additional governance layer, identifying and moving sites remains a hands-on process. 

While it’s easy enough to manually move a few sites in smaller environments, the process becomes complicated as your footprint grows. Even with native automation options like SharePoint Advanced Management, maintaining a truly well-governed environment at scale is a hurdle. This is where a third-party tool like ShareGate Protect steps in, bridging the gap between “just archiving” and having a full, easy-to-use governance strategy that keeps your tenant organized without the premium licensing complexity. 

Uncover and resolve governance drift with ShareGate

Archiving a few quiet SharePoint sites is a great first step toward a cleaner tenant. But inactive sites are usually a symptom of a larger issue: governance drift. When sites sit idle, they often turn into black boxes of ownership gaps, sprawl, and outdated access permissions that create not just a storage bill but a security risk.

ShareGate Protect simplifies the complex work of identifying these risks by giving you unified visibility across SharePoint, Teams, Groups, and OneDrive. Instead of just hunting for old files, you can see the full picture of your environment’s health, including data exposure, workspace clutter, and AI and Copilot readiness.

The goal isn’t just to save on storage; it’s to give you the clarity to see exactly where your permissions are drifting and the tools to fix them through guided remediation. Whether you’re archiving a legacy site or revoking a guest’s access, ShareGate helps you take decisive action to keep your M365 environment secure and grounded.

Ready to see what’s really happening in your tenant? Request a demo to uncover governance drift and start securing your environment today.