How to configure and run SharePoint Archiving (Capacity Savings)

Objective

Follow these steps to authorize, configure, and execute SharePoint Archiving (also known as Capacity Savings) to optimize your Microsoft 365 backup storage.

Environment

• CrashPlan for Microsoft 365
• Capacity Savings add-on purchased
• Administrative access to the CrashPlan console

Procedure

Step 1: Grant administrator consent

Before you can configure archiving policies, a Microsoft 365 administrator must authorize the CrashPlan app to manage storage.

1. Sign in to the CrashPlan console.
2. Navigate to Settings > Destination storage credentials > Microsoft 365 Configurations.
3. Click Grant Admin Consent next to Consent for Capacity Savings.
4. In the Microsoft login window that appears, sign in using your Microsoft 365 Administrator account.
5. Review the requested permissions and click Accept.
6. Return to the CrashPlan console and verify that a green checkmark now appears under the Status column for Consent for Capacity Savings.

Step 2: Configure the archival policy

Define the specific conditions a file must meet to be considered "cold" and eligible for archiving.

1. Navigate to Policy Management > SharePoint Online Policies > Policy Configuration in the console.
2. Click Create Policy (or select an existing policy to edit or clone).
3. Navigate to the General tab and enable the toggle for Archive files from SharePoint Online if.
4. Check the boxes and define the thresholds for your desired eligibility conditions:
   • Include sites which are consuming more than (%) of the total SharePoint storage quota: > Important Note: Unlike OneDrive, SharePoint uses tenant-pooled storage. This threshold evaluates the individual site's size against your entire tenant's total quota. Because a single large site may consume the majority of your tenant's pooled storage, you may want to set this threshold very low (e.g., 1%) to ensure large sites are optimized.
   • Documents have not been modified in (days)
   • Documents are of size greater than (MB)
5. Save your policy configuration.
   A file must meet ALL of the selected conditions to be archived.

Step 3: Execute the Capacity Savings job

Once your consent is granted and your policy is defined, you can execute the archiving job.

1. Navigate to Manage Assets > SharePoint Online > Capacity Savings in the console.
2. To allow the system to run the job on an automatic 12-hour schedule, enable the Capacity Savings Job – Run Automatically toggle.
3. To manually execute a job immediately, click Run Now under the Capacity Savings Job Status section.
4. Select your desired execution mode:
   • Dry run: Evaluates the policy and generates an estimated savings report. No actual files are archived or changed.
   • Live run: Actively archives files matching your policy, replacing the original files in primary SharePoint storage with lightweight URL stubs.
5. If you selected a Live run, read the confirmation prompt and click OK to proceed.
6. Monitor the progress of your active execution under the Capacity Savings Job Status section. Progress will refresh approximately every 100 files processed.

Additional information

• Aborting jobs: You can abort an actively running job at any time by clicking Stop (Abort). Any storage savings achieved before the job was aborted will be retained.
• Job concurrency: Only one SharePoint Capacity Savings job can run at a time. However, these jobs can run in parallel with any OneDrive Capacity Savings jobs.
• Reporting: To review the exact storage reclaimed and the number of items stubbed during previous runs, click View Capacity Savings Job History. You can also export asset-level savings details by navigating to Dashboard > SharePoint Online > Reports > Capacity Savings and downloading the report as an Excel or PDF file.

Related articles

• Understanding SharePoint Archiving in CrashPlan for Microsoft 365