Microsoft 365 archive — leavers and old sites

When someone leaves, their licence goes and the mailbox follows it thirty days later. The Office Archive is a single snapshot of one person — mailbox, OneDrive, the sites they owned — taken before that happens, stored as one ZIP in the customer's storage and listed in the console for as long as they keep it. The Google Workspace archive does the same for Gmail and Drive.

When to use it #

• A leaver. Archive first, then remove the account. The ZIP is the record — for the replacement, for HR, for a subject-access request two years on.
• A finished project site. A SharePoint site nobody edits any more but nobody dares delete: archive it, then remove it from the tenant and stop paying for the storage.
• Before a tenant migration or a licence downgrade, as a point-in-time copy outside Microsoft.

For the recurring, item-by-item copy of a whole tenant — new mail every six hours, every user, restorable by message — use the Microsoft 365 backup instead. The two are complementary: the backup is for getting things back, the archive is for keeping a leaver's data after the account is gone.

Create an archive #

1. Connectors → Office Archive → New Archive. The customer's Microsoft 365 must already be connected.
2. Choose the person (their UPN), and tick Mailbox and/or OneDrive. Add any SharePoint sites to include — the ones they owned, or a site being retired on its own.
3. Choose where it runs — one of the customer's agents, or the Caryvane Cloud Agent so nothing passes through their hardware — and the storage target the ZIP goes to. Give it a label if the person's name is not enough ("J. Smith — left 2026-09").
4. Create. The archive runs as a job: it appears in Run History with progress, and under Office Archive with its size and date when done. A running archive can be cancelled from the same list.

What is in the ZIP #

Mail as one .eml per message under mail/, with the folder structure recorded; OneDrive files in their folders; each SharePoint site's document libraries. Everything is in its original format, so the ZIP is readable with nothing but a ZIP tool and a mail client — no Caryvane needed to open it in five years. Nothing is deleted from Microsoft 365 by the archive; removing the account is the customer's own step afterwards.

Getting it back #

Connectors → Office Archive lists every archive with a download. The ZIP is also in the storage target under the job's prefix, for anyone with the storage credentials.

Google Workspace archive #

Connectors → Google Workspace Archive → New Archive: the person's email, Gmail and/or Drive, agent or Cloud Agent, storage target. Same ZIP, same listing, same use — a leaver on Google. Gmail is stored as .eml, Drive files in their folders with Google-native documents exported to Office formats.

Archiving old documents that are staying #

This page is about people and sites leaving. For documents that stay in a live SharePoint site but are old enough to move to cheap storage — projects over three years old, correspondence over one — see the Archiving Policy, which works folder by folder with a catalogue and, once you choose to, removes the originals.

Availability #

Archives use the connectors, which are available on paid plans; on a trial the option is shown greyed with the reason.