When a M365 tenant exhausts the storage allocation provided with the subscription, the expense for additional storage is substantial. Moreover, organisations often must retain numerous files with version history in SharePoint for regulatory or other purposes over many years.

Moving the binary parts of the Document Library Items to a cheaper storage platform namely Microsoft Azure Blob Storage

When a SharePoint Online Document Library item (file) is offloaded, its binary content is removed and stored in Azure Blob Storage, leaving behind an empty shell/proxy with a blob reference. Despite this, the item’s metadata and version history remain intact. The file can still be renamed, moved, or copied within the tenant manually or using various migration tools or scripts. The folder containing the Document Library items plays no role in this process.

How does the Smart Offload solution work?

Smart Offload is a user-friendly software that operates easily via Microsoft Teams. It is a stand-alone module within the SMART Migration platform for data migration and reorganisation. The solution moves selected data to Azure Blob storage while keeping the original file structure for complete transparency.

Key Features

• Keep Documents in SharePoint visible and with all metadata including version history.
• Option to keep current version and only offload version history.
• Incremental Offload of new versions to files where the current version is retained or new files that have been added.
• Select what you want to Offload (Libraries, Folders, individual files).
• Use filters to qualify what to Offload including file size, modified and subfolders.
• Restore single files, folders, or libraries.
• Restore to different location (Teams or another site). INCLUDING version history
• Support for Copy/Move files that are offloaded. (Restore them from Blob Storage at any time)
• Multiple Offload/Restore jobs can be imported from any data source.
• Version trimming option. (Delete all versions of retain the latest NN versions)
• For security reasons: File should be known that it insists with metadata and version history, but users may not view/edit