Denise runs the project management office for a mid-sized commercial construction firm, 140 staff across three regional offices. Every job gets its own SharePoint site the day the contract is signed: drawings, submittals, RFIs, daily logs, subcontractor correspondence. The problem starts when the job finishes.
The situation
Closed-out projects were supposed to move from the active "Projects - Current" hub to a "Projects - Archive" hub within thirty days of substantial completion. In practice, project managers were busy starting the next job, and archiving fell to whoever in the PMO had a spare afternoon. By the time Denise took over the role, the active hub held 61 sites. Nineteen of them belonged to projects that had closed out between eight months and three years earlier.
The active hub's size was slowing down site search for the people who needed it most. New project managers navigating to their own current jobs had to scroll past a wall of finished work. Storage reporting was also muddied: the firm could not get an accurate read on active-project storage consumption because closed jobs were sitting in the same pool.
"We knew exactly which nineteen sites needed to move. Getting them there without breaking links in the punch-list trackers people still referenced was the part nobody wanted to own."
- Denise, PMO Lead
Why a straight copy-paste wasn't good enough
Denise's first instinct was to have an intern manually recreate folder structures in the archive hub and drag files across using File Explorer sync. Three problems showed up fast:
- Large project sites, some over 40 GB with drawing sets and photo logs, made browser and sync-client transfers slow and prone to timing out partway through.
- A failed transfer partway through a folder left no clear record of what had copied and what had not, so the intern had to eyeball folder contents afterward to check.
- Metadata columns tracking submittal status and RFI numbers did not survive a drag-and-drop copy through the sync client; they came across as blank.
After the first attempt corrupted metadata on two projects' submittal logs, Denise put the manual approach on hold and looked for a way to move whole site libraries without re-keying anything.
The approach: resume-safe moves at the folder level
Denise's team used ShareMaster's Copy To / Move To tool to move each closed project's document libraries from its site in the active hub into a matching site under the archive hub, within the same tenant. Because the tool tracks progress at the item level and can resume a job that stops partway through, a network interruption partway through a 40 GB transfer did not mean starting over. It picked up from where it left off.
| Before | After | |
|---|---|---|
| Active hub site count | 61 sites, 19 closed | 42 sites, all active |
| Metadata on moved items | Lost on manual drag-and-drop attempt | Preserved by the move |
| Time to move a 40 GB project | Half a day, manual, with retries | Ran unattended overnight |
| Failed-transfer recovery | Manual folder comparison | Job resumes automatically |
How the nineteen sites were handled
- Denise's team confirmed each project's substantial-completion date against the site's document status to build the move list.
- For each project, the team created a matching destination site under the archive hub using the firm's standard archive template.
- Copy To / Move To ran the move library-by-library, overnight, so the transfer did not compete with daytime site traffic.
- Once a project's move was confirmed complete, the team set the active site to read-only for two weeks as a safety buffer before deletion.
Handling the links people still relied on
A handful of project managers kept punch-list tracking lists in SharePoint with hyperlink columns pointing straight into specific project folders for items still being closed out with subcontractors. Moving the underlying library changed those folder URLs, breaking the links stored in those columns. Denise's team followed ShareMaster's broken URL guide as a follow-up pass after each move, using Replace Master to update the old folder paths stored in those hyperlink columns rather than leaving people to discover broken links on their own.
What almost went wrong
The second batch of moves ran into a permissions surprise. Three of the closed projects had subcontractors still holding external guest access from the punch-list closeout phase, and the archive hub's sites had tighter default sharing settings than the active hub. When the libraries landed in their new home, the external accounts lost access without anyone flagging it in advance.
Two subcontractors called in the same week asking why they could no longer see the closeout photos they needed for their own invoicing records. Denise's team resolved it by checking each moved project against its external-access list before the move, rather than after, and re-granting access at the destination for any external account still legitimately owed it. It added a short review step to the process but avoided repeating the same surprise on the remaining sixteen projects.
The outcome
The active hub dropped from 61 sites to 42, all of them genuinely current work. Storage reporting became meaningful again once closed-project data sat in its own hub with its own quota tracking. The PMO built a standing process: any project marked substantially complete gets queued for a move within two weeks, run as a batch once a fortnight rather than left to accumulate.
Denise's estimate: the manual approach would have taken roughly six to eight weeks of intermittent effort to clear the backlog, with real risk of metadata loss on each attempt. The batch moves cleared all nineteen projects in eleven working days, most of it unattended overnight processing.
Deciding what stays behind
Not everything from a closed project moved. Denise's team kept a lightweight pointer site in the active hub for the first ninety days after each move, containing nothing but a single page linking to the new archive location and listing the project's key contacts. Field staff and subcontractors who bookmarked the old site landed on an explanation instead of a dead link, and the pointer site was deleted once traffic to it dropped to near zero.
Denise's team held back photos and daily logs from the final two weeks of each project, still being finalised for the closeout package, and transferred them in a short follow-up batch once the project manager confirmed the file was truly final. Moving a library that is still being actively edited risks someone saving a change to a file mid-transfer, so the team's rule became: no move starts until the project manager confirms the content is frozen.
If your project sites are piling up
Start by identifying which sites are genuinely closed rather than just quiet. A site with no new uploads in ninety days is not automatically finished; check with the project manager before moving anything. Once the list is confirmed, moving whole libraries in a batch, overnight, avoids the two failure modes that hurt Denise's first attempt: timeouts on large transfers and metadata loss on manual copies.
For sites where the decision is closure versus outright deletion rather than archiving, the site archive versus delete guide covers how to make that call.