Microsoft 365 Copilot ignores archived content. That makes Microsoft 365 Archive one of the fastest ways to improve the answers your Copilot licenses produce, and for many tenants it costs nothing. This month (July 26), file-level archiving reached general availability and switched on by default, so if you haven’t looked at the archive yet, now is the time.
File-level archiving is now GA, and it’s on by default in your tenant
Until this month, archiving individual files in Microsoft 365 Archive meant enabling the feature through PowerShell. That has changed. Microsoft’s worldwide rollout of file-level archiving (Roadmap ID 477371) began in early July 2026, with default-on enablement for tenants that already have Microsoft 365 Archive configured starting July 6 and completing by late July. If your tenant runs Microsoft 365 Archive and you haven’t restricted the scope, file-level archiving is now live across your SharePoint sites.
That default means the archive stops being a site-level blunt instrument and becomes something admins and site owners can apply to the actual problem: the stale files sitting inside otherwise active sites, from expired contracts and superseded proposals to project decks nobody has opened since the project wrapped.
It also puts archiving in users’ hands. Anyone with edit permissions now sees an Archive action in SharePoint on the web, and anyone with read permissions can reactivate archived files. That’s worth knowing on two counts: your users can start tidying without a ticket, and your users can start archiving things, so it belongs on your governance radar as well as your storage plan.
If your organization hasn’t looked at Microsoft 365 Archive yet, this is the moment.
Why archived content makes Copilot sharper
Copilot reasons over everything it can reach. It doesn’t distinguish between the current version of your travel policy and the three superseded versions sitting in the same library. If the wrong data is in scope, the wrong data shapes the answer.
Microsoft 365 Archive removes content from that equation without deleting it. Microsoft’s own documentation is explicit: archived content isn’t used by Microsoft 365 Copilot. Meanwhile, eDiscovery, retention policies, and your compliance tooling continue to operate on it exactly as before. The data remains yours, fully governed and discoverable by legal. It just stops feeding stale information into your AI answers.
Richard Harbridge, Technology & Ecosystem Strategist at ShareGate, says Microsoft 365 Archive is “the number one tool for improving Copilot effectiveness,” because what most organizations have is a lot of data that’s the wrong data.
We made a similar argument in our recent piece on SharePoint storage costs: the storage you’ve been ignoring inflates your Microsoft bill and degrades the AI tool you’ve already paid for.
What Microsoft 365 Archive costs (often nothing)
There’s no license to buy. Microsoft 365 Archive is a pay-as-you-go service billed through an Azure subscription, enabled in the Microsoft 365 admin center. That’s the catch and the opportunity in one: every tenant can use it, but someone has to set it up.
The pricing has a detail most admins miss. You’re only charged for archived storage when your combined storage, active plus archived, exceeds your tenant’s standard SharePoint quota. If you’re under quota, archived storage costs you nothing. Many organizations assume the meter starts running the moment they archive a file. It doesn’t.
When you do exceed quota, archived storage is billed at $0.05/GB/month against $0.20/GB/month for standard SharePoint storage. That’s a 75% saving on every gigabyte you move to the archive tier. At tenant scale it adds up fast: a single terabyte of stale content costs around $200 a month in the active tier, $50 in the archive, and nothing at all if you’re still under quota.
And the historic objection, the reactivation fee, is gone. On March 31, 2025, Microsoft eliminated the charge for reactivating archived SharePoint content. Getting something back now costs nothing; the only restriction is that newly reactivated content can’t be re-archived for four months. Before that change, admins had to weigh every archive decision against a $0.60/GB restore bill. Now the decision is close to risk-free.
One exception to note: unlicensed OneDrive accounts follow different rules and still incur reactivation charges. Since Microsoft began auto-archiving unlicensed OneDrive accounts, that’s worth checking before the bill surprises you. (Our SharePoint storage piece covers the ex-employee OneDrive problem in detail.)
What to archive: the zero-views test
The reason organizations hoard data is visibility. A file share can only show you a modified date; it can’t tell you whether anyone has actually looked at a file in three years. So people keep everything, because they don’t know.
SharePoint can tell you. Once content has sat there for three to six months with zero views, you have your answer: nobody needs it in the active tier. Harbridge’s observation from ShareGate’s work across 200,000 IT professionals is that organizations overwhelmingly treat this as an archive event rather than a deletion event. Archive it, then watch for anything that breaks or anyone who shouts. Deletion, if it comes, happens later, from the archive, through your normal disposition process.
That order of operations is what makes cleanup politically possible. Nobody has to sign off on destroying data. They only have to agree that content nobody has viewed in six months doesn’t need to sit in front of Copilot.
Migrating? Verify, then archive in place
If you’re mid-migration, from file shares, from SharePoint Server 2016 or 2019, or consolidating tenants after an acquisition, there’s a pattern worth building into the plan: migrate, verify, archive.
Move the content, confirm it landed, then archive it in place using Microsoft 365 Archive. The migration is complete and auditable, eDiscovery works, and the content isn’t polluting search results or Copilot answers from day one in the new environment. If nobody touches it over the following months, your disposition process handles the rest.
This pairs naturally with the lift-the-mess approach to migration, moving content as-is and optimizing in the destination, where the tooling is better. More on that in our conversation with Richard Harbridge coming up next week.
Turning archiving into policy with SharePoint Advanced Management
A one-off archive sweep helps once. A policy helps forever.
Site lifecycle management in SharePoint Advanced Management (SAM) automates the movement of inactive sites into the archive tier using admin-defined policies: set the criteria, run it in simulation mode to see what it would catch, then let it notify site owners and act on a schedule. If you have even one Microsoft 365 Copilot license in your tenant, SAM is already available to you, which makes this one of the more underused entitlements in the stack.
We’ve written a full walkthrough of SharePoint Advanced Management, including how to scope and test lifecycle policies before switching them on.
Four things to know before you lean on it
A few things to know, so nothing surprises you:
Archived sites disappear from end-user view and search results. That’s the point, but tell your users before their bookmarked 2021 project site vanishes.
The four-month lock applies after reactivation. If someone restores a site, it stays in the active tier (and on the active meter, if you’re over quota) for four months before it can be re-archived.
Archiving a team doesn’t archive its SharePoint site, and archiving a Teams-connected site doesn’t archive the team. Microsoft Teams archive and Microsoft 365 Archive are independent features. If you want both dormant, you do both.
File-level archiving covers SharePoint, not OneDrive. Files stored in OneDrive don’t show the Archive option, so personal drives need a different cleanup route.
Frequently asked questions
Will archiving break eDiscovery, retention, or compliance holds?
No. Archived content stays inside your Microsoft 365 security and compliance boundary. eDiscovery, retention policies, and sensitivity labels continue to work on archived content without reactivating it. That’s the core difference between Microsoft 365 Archive and moving data out to third-party cold storage.
Someone needs a file back from an archived site. What does that cost, and how long does it take?
Since March 31, 2025, reactivating archived SharePoint content is free. Reactivation typically completes within 24 hours, and files archived within the previous seven days come back instantly. Plan around the four-month re-archive restriction on anything you bring back.
We’re under our SharePoint storage quota. Is there any reason to archive at all?
Yes, and it’s arguably the best position to be in: while you’re under quota, archiving is free, and the benefit is entirely about quality. Every stale site you archive is content Copilot stops reasoning over and users stop finding in search. The storage saving comes later, when growth would otherwise have pushed you into paid territory.
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Not sure what’s safe to archive? Cloudwell can run the inventory, from view data and version history to ex-employee OneDrives and build the lifecycle policies that keep your tenant Copilot-ready. Contact Cloudwell