What happens when someone clicks an archived file
The whole path, and who is allowed to do it
Someone in a document library sees a file with its usual name and clicks it. This is everything that happens between that click and the file opening, and every point at which the answer can be no.
Reads only. Nothing in SharePoint is changed.
What it tells you
- Permissions are never bypassed. The file is fetched as the person who clicked, using their own SharePoint session, so someone who could not open the original cannot open the archived copy.
- The placeholder itself contains no credential of any kind. It holds a pointer and nothing else, and both readers of it refuse outright if a credential-shaped value ever appears in one.
- The link that fetches the bytes is short-lived and signed with a Microsoft identity, not with an account key.
- A placeholder set to put the file back ends with the real file back in SharePoint, opening in Word or Excel as it always did. One set to download a copy ends with a download.
How it runs
- The click reaches your Archive application. Because setup step 3 registered .shurl with Microsoft as belonging to it. Or, before that has propagated, the person uses Open with ShareMaster in the library toolbar, where the Archive app is deployed.
- The request lands on your endpoint. In your own Azure subscription. It is told which item was clicked and by whom - and nothing else: the request carries no access to the file.
- The person signs in. With their own Microsoft account, the first time and whenever their sign-in has lapsed.
- The placeholder is read as that person. Their own permissions decide. If they cannot read the placeholder, this is where it stops.
- The file comes back. The placeholder says which: a short-lived, signed link downloads a copy, or the file is written back into SharePoint in place of the placeholder - same item, same history - and opened.
What it will not do
- A file put back by a click keeps its Created date and Created By, but its Modified date becomes the time of the click and Modified By becomes the person who clicked. The click writes as that person, and SharePoint does not let it set those two. Restore Archived Files, run from ShareMaster, keeps all four.
- A restored file no longer saves you space. If most people restore most files, the saving erodes - which is why a placeholder can be set to download a copy instead, for things nobody needs back in SharePoint.
- A file in a folder someone syncs to their PC behaves differently, and that case is not yet covered.
Read next
- What this costs, and how to undo it: Charges, and getting every file back.
- Back to contents: The setup steps and how they fit together.