# Purview can now archive files on a retention policy, and the storage saving is not the point > Retention policies and labels got an archive action this summer. Every write-up sells it on 75 percent cheaper storage. For most organisations under 500 users that saving is exactly zero, and the feature is still worth turning on, for a different reason. [Home](https://tenantcraft.ca/) [Insights](https://tenantcraft.ca/insights) Governance Govern Aug 20, 2026 5 min read Geri Crroj Microsoft 365 consultant, Niagara, Ontario ## What hurts Copilot answers out of whatever is in SharePoint. That includes the 2019 tender folder, four copies of a policy nobody approved, and a departed employee’s drafts. Nobody wants to delete any of it, so it sits there, and Copilot keeps reading it. Purview picked up a new tool for this. Retention policies and retention labels can now move SharePoint Online and OneDrive files into **Microsoft 365 Archive** as an intermediate step, before the retention period expires. It reached general availability between late June and mid-July 2026, it’s off by default, and it needs an admin to switch it on. Every write-up frames it as a storage play: archive tier costs 75 percent less than active SharePoint storage. That framing is wrong for most of the organisations I work with, and it buries the part that actually matters. The 5-minute version 1. **Retention policies and labels get an Archive action.** Off by default, configured in Purview Data Lifecycle Management. 2. **You need Microsoft 365 Archive configured first**, which means a live pay-as-you-go billing relationship. 3. **The archive meter only charges above your pooled quota.** Under it, archiving costs nothing. 4. **Archived files leave Copilot’s index** but stay in eDiscovery. That is the actual reason to do this. 5. **Reactivation is free**, but you can’t re-archive that content for four months. ## Why your storage bill will not change Microsoft 365 Archive is billed at **$0.05 USD per GB per month**, and the meter is conditional. It charges only when archived plus active storage **exceeds your tenant’s licensed SharePoint quota**. Under the quota, the additional cost is zero. Your pooled quota is 1 TB plus 10 GB per licensed user. ![A table of four organisation sizes against pooled SharePoint quota, typical usage and resulting archive bill. Fifty users get 1.5 TB and typically use around 300 GB. One hundred users get 2 TB and use around 600 GB. Two hundred and fifty users get 3.5 TB and use around 1.5 TB. Five hundred users get 6 TB and use around 3 TB. In every case the archive bill is zero dollars.](https://tenantcraft.ca/images/purview-archive-quota-math.png) Quota is 1 TB plus 10 GB per licensed user Typical usage figures are illustrative, but the shape holds: most organisations under 500 users are nowhere near the quota, so the meter never fires. Run your own numbers before you believe a savings pitch. Open the SharePoint admin center, go to **Sites → Active sites**, and read the bar at the top right. It shows what you’ve used against your total, and it takes about ten seconds. ![The Active sites page in the SharePoint admin center. A storage bar in the top right reads 32.00 MB used of 1.24 TB. Below it, a table of sites lists each site name, URL and storage used in gigabytes.](https://tenantcraft.ca/images/spo-storage-quota-check.png) SharePoint admin center · Sites, Active sites The bar top right is the whole answer. Under your quota, the archive meter never charges you, no matter how much you archive. If you’re at 40 percent of quota, archiving 200 GB saves you nothing, because you weren’t paying for that 200 GB in the first place. The feature still earns its place, just not on the storage line of the budget. ## The reason to turn it on Archived content is excluded from Copilot indexing. Microsoft’s own framing is that this helps answer relevance, which is a polite way of saying Copilot stops reading your digital debris. What it does not do is hide anything from compliance. ![Two columns. Archiving changes this: Copilot indexing is excluded, third-party AI tools have no access, storage class moves to archive tier, and cost above quota only is five cents per gigabyte per month. And leaves this alone: eDiscovery search still finds it, retention processing continues, legal hold still applies, and getting a file back is free and self-serve.](https://tenantcraft.ca/images/purview-archive-effect.png) What the archive action does and does not touch The left column is why you would do it. The right column is why it is safe to. The two columns together are the whole feature. Files stop feeding Copilot and third-party AI tools, and they stay indexed for eDiscovery, still under retention processing, still subject to legal hold. You are not deleting anything and you are not putting anything beyond reach. It’s the same problem the [HR folder post](https://tenantcraft.ca/insights/copilot-without-leaking-hr) solves with permissions, approached from the other end. Permissions decide who can see a file. Archiving decides whether Copilot should be reading it at all. ## Four things that bite **Reactivation is free, but sticky.** The reactivation fee was eliminated on March 31, 2025. Pulling a file back costs nothing. The catch is that you can’t re-archive newly reactivated content for **four months**, so a file someone retrieves stays in active storage, and back in Copilot’s index, for a third of a year. That exemption doesn’t apply to OneDrive accounts. **Billing must stay healthy.** If Microsoft 365 Archive is switched off, or the billing subscription lapses, archived content stays archived and can still be reactivated, but new archive actions are blocked and **archived content counts as active storage again**. A lapsed card quietly puts you back over quota. **Unlicensed OneDrive accounts are billed differently.** They’re charged per GB archived and per GB reactivated, and they can’t use spare SharePoint storage to avoid the charge. Departed-employee OneDrive accounts are exactly the content you’d want to archive, so price that one separately. **It’s an addition to a retention policy, not a replacement.** The archive step happens before the retention period expires. Deletion still happens on schedule. If your retention schedule is wrong, archiving files on the way to the wrong outcome doesn’t fix it. ## How to fix it 1. **Check your quota position** in the SharePoint admin center. This tells you whether cost is even part of the conversation. 2. **Set up Microsoft 365 Archive** with pay-as-you-go billing, if it isn’t already. Nothing works without it. 3. **Pick the retention policies worth changing.** Start with the ones covering old project sites and departed-user content, not live team libraries. 4. **Add the archive action** in Purview Data Lifecycle Management, and keep the deletion schedule you already had. 5. **Test the retrieval path** with one file before you scale it, so you find out what reactivation feels like for a user while it’s still a test. Step 2 is not optional, and there’s an easy way to check whether you’ve done it. Create a retention policy, scope it to SharePoint and OneDrive, and look at the retention settings step. ![The retention settings step of the Create retention policy wizard in Microsoft Purview, headed decide if you want to retain content, delete it, or both. The options are retain items for a specific period, retain items forever, and only delete items when they reach a certain age. There is no archive option.](https://tenantcraft.ca/images/purview-retention-no-archive-option.png) Purview · Data Lifecycle Management Three options, no archive action. That is what the step looks like in a tenant where Microsoft 365 Archive has not been set up, and no amount of clicking will surface it until billing is in place. ## Bottom line If someone sells you this as a storage saving, check your quota first. Under it the saving is zero, and the pitch is noise. Turn it on anyway. Getting stale content out of Copilot’s index without deleting it, losing eDiscovery coverage, or breaking a legal hold is a genuinely good trade, and until this shipped there was no clean way to do it. Working out what Copilot should not be reading? The checklist covers the whole sweep. Copilot Readiness Governance Checklist PDF · 7 pages · 44 checkpoints [Email me the PDF](https://tenantcraft.ca/resources/guides/copilot-readiness-governance) TWENTY MINUTES, NO PITCH ## Tell me what is stuck. I will tell you what it takes. Same consultant from the first email to the last cutover. If I am not the right fit, I will refer you to someone who is. [Book a 20-min call](https://tenantcraft.ca/contact) [See published rates](https://tenantcraft.ca/pricing) --- _Canonical HTML: https://tenantcraft.ca/insights/purview-archive-retention-copilot · Agent guide: https://tenantcraft.ca/llms.txt · Site map: https://tenantcraft.ca/sitemap-index.xml_