Completed project sites do not disappear on their own. They sit in the tenant, consuming storage, cluttering navigation, confusing new staff, and quietly violating document retention policies. Most IT teams know the problem exists; few have a clean process for dealing with it. This case study shows how one property development firm worked through a backlog of eight finished-project SharePoint sites in a single week.
Meet Lee, IT Manager at a 90-person property development company. The firm runs projects across residential and commercial developments, each with its own SharePoint site: drawings, contracts, consultant correspondence, council submissions, and handover packs. When a project settles, the site stops being actively used but nobody closes it down. After four years, Lee had inherited eight dormant project sites, totalling around 65 GB of storage, sitting alongside the active projects in the tenant navigation.
Eight sites, no decommission plan
The immediate problem was not the storage. It was the confusion. New staff navigating to "Sites" in SharePoint saw a mix of active projects and completed ones with no visible distinction. On two occasions, contractors had accessed documents on a completed site thinking they were looking at the current project. The company's legal team had also flagged that finished-project documents needed to be retained for seven years under construction industry regulations, but nobody had checked whether the existing setup actually satisfied that requirement.
Lee needed to solve three things at once: preserve the documents for compliance, free up active-tenant navigation, and reduce the storage bill before the next licence renewal.
When to archive a completed SharePoint project site vs delete it
Lee's first decision was whether each site needed archiving or could be deleted outright. The criteria came down to three questions:
- Is there a retention obligation? Construction documentation typically carries a 7-year legal retention requirement. Any site with contracts, certificates, or council submissions could not be deleted until that period had run.
- Could the content be needed for reference? Completed projects often become reference material for similar future projects. Design drawings, specifications, and lessons-learned documents have value beyond the active phase.
- Has the data already been duplicated elsewhere? A handful of sites were mirrors of content already stored in the project management system. Those were candidates for deletion once verified.
Six of the eight sites needed archiving. Two could be safely deleted after confirming the content was backed up in the project management platform.
The archive migration process
Lee set up a dedicated SharePoint site collection called "Project Archive" with a simple folder structure matching the project naming convention. The plan was to copy each completed site into the archive collection as its own sub-site, then revoke user access on the source and eventually decommission it.
- Trim version history on the source sites. Using Space Master's Version Trimmer, Lee set a five-version limit across all six source sites and ran the trim. This reduced the combined size from 65 GB to 38 GB before anything had moved. The trim took about 20 minutes across all six sites.
- Run a test migration on the smallest site. Lee used Clone Master to copy the smallest completed project site into the archive collection as a pilot. The operation completed in 11 minutes and produced a transfer log showing file counts, metadata, and any skipped items.
- Verify the pilot result. Lee spot-checked 20 documents in the archive copy against the source site. File names, metadata, and the last two versions were intact. The migration log showed zero skipped items.
- Migrate the remaining five sites. With the process confirmed, Lee queued the remaining five sites. Clone Master ran them sequentially overnight. Total migration time for all six was under three hours.
- Apply retention labels. After confirming the archive copies, Lee applied a Microsoft Purview retention label set to a seven-year period to each archived site. This satisfied the legal hold requirement without any manual document tagging.
- Remove access from source sites. Lee removed the existing site members from the source sites and set them to read-only for a 30-day observation period. No complaints arrived. After 30 days, the source sites were deleted.
- Delete the two redundant sites. The two sites confirmed as already duplicated elsewhere were deleted directly, without migration, after a final sign-off from the legal team.
See how Clone Master handles site migrations
What changed after the project
The tenant navigation now shows only active projects. Within a week, the 30 staff members who had been most vocal about navigation confusion confirmed the clutter was gone. Combined storage savings - version trimming plus the deletion of two redundant sites - came to 45 GB, which put the firm comfortably inside its licence allocation ahead of the renewal.
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Dormant project sites in tenant | 8 | 0 |
| Combined storage consumed | 65 GB | 20 GB (archive) |
| Retention obligation satisfied | Unclear | Yes, via Purview labels |
| Total migration time | - | Under 3 hours |
Lee's main takeaway was process: the firm now has a project closeout checklist that triggers a Clone Master migration and version trim within 30 days of a project settling. What was a multi-year backlog problem is now a routine 90-minute task for each completed project.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should I archive or delete a completed SharePoint project site?
Archive if the project has legal, compliance, or reference value and could be searched in future. Delete if the content is genuinely redundant and retention policies have been satisfied. When in doubt, archive first. Storage saved by deletion is rarely worth the risk of premature loss.
How do I archive a SharePoint site without deleting it?
Use Clone Master to copy the site's content into a dedicated archive site collection. Once verified, remove user access from the source and apply a retention label if required. For long-term archiving, Microsoft 365 Archive can hold the site at a reduced storage rate outside the active licence pool.
Does moving a SharePoint site to an archive preserve version history?
Clone Master preserves version history during the copy operation by default. You can also use Space Master's Version Trimmer before migrating to reduce the amount of historical data carried into the archive, which is what Lee did to cut storage by 27 GB before the migration even ran.