Construction firm cut SharePoint overage costs — by archiving 5+ year-old files to Azure Blob.
After years on SharePoint, a construction company had grown well beyond its allotted storage and was paying monthly overage charges that kept climbing. Most of the bloat wasn't current work — it was years of completed-project documents, old drawings, archived correspondence, and historical records that legally couldn't be deleted but rarely needed to be opened. They needed a way to archive files older than 5 years to Azure Blob, keep them retrievable for retention requirements, and stop paying premium SharePoint rates for cold data.
Years of project history. A monthly bill that kept growing.
Construction is a document-heavy business. Every project produces blueprints, change orders, RFIs, submittals, photographs, inspection reports, contracts, and correspondence — and once a project ends, most of that documentation has to stay accessible for years to satisfy contract obligations, warranty periods, and potential litigation. After many years on SharePoint, the company had accumulated terabytes of completed-project records sitting alongside their active work.
The problem wasn't that the data was wrong to keep — it was that it was wrong to keep in SharePoint Online. SharePoint storage is priced for active collaboration, not for archive. Once the tenant's included allotment was exceeded, every additional gigabyte was billed at SharePoint overage rates — month after month, year after year, for files no one had opened in half a decade. The team needed to move the cold data somewhere appropriate for archive without losing access to it.
Split the data by age. Right-tier each side.
The goal wasn't to migrate everything — it was to keep current work in SharePoint and move only the cold archive to cheaper Azure Blob storage.
"Just delete it" isn't an option in construction.
Every obvious quick fix ran into a real construction-industry constraint.
Retention rules block deletion
Construction documents are bound by contract retention requirements, warranty periods, and statute-of-limitation windows that can stretch a decade or more. "Just delete it to save money" isn't a legal option for most of what was filling the tenant.
Buying more SharePoint storage was wasteful
Paying SharePoint premium rates for files no one opens is the textbook wrong tier of storage. Continuing to add quota to accommodate cold data meant compounding overage charges every month, indefinitely.
Manual sorting wasn't realistic
Asking project managers and IT staff to manually identify which files were old enough to archive — across thousands of sites and millions of files — would have been a multi-month project on its own, and it wouldn't have stayed accurate.
Generic migration tools couldn't filter by date
Most migration utilities will move everything or nothing. Without a precise file age filter, the team couldn't programmatically separate cold archive from active data and would have ended up either moving too much or moving nothing useful.
Date-filtered migration from SharePoint to Azure Blob.
GS RichCopy 360 Enterprise's date-based file filter let the team programmatically select only files older than 5 years and migrate them — and only them — to Azure Blob.
Define the Date Filter
The team configured GS RichCopy 360 Enterprise with a date filter that matched files with a last-modified date older than 5 years. Anything newer was excluded from the migration; anything older was selected.
Pull from SharePoint, Write to Azure Blob
RichCopy 360 read the matching content from SharePoint sites and document libraries and wrote it to Azure Blob storage — files landed in their native format, organized for archival retrieval if ever needed.
Verify, Then Reclaim SharePoint Space
Once the archive was complete and verified against the migration log, the team safely removed the archived content from SharePoint — bringing the tenant back below its allotted storage and eliminating the monthly overage charges.
The capability that made this work was the date-based file filter — specifically, filtering by last-modified date rather than creation date, which matters because a document created ten years ago but actively edited last month is still active work. By matching on last-modified, the migration cleanly captured genuinely cold data and left current work alone.
The economic logic is simple: SharePoint storage is priced for collaboration; Azure Blob is priced for storage. Cold data sitting in SharePoint is paying a premium for capabilities — co-authoring, search, in-place sharing — that retention-bound archives don't need. Moving those files to Azure Blob keeps them safe, durable, and retrievable for the retention period without paying SharePoint rates every month they sit there. The migration paid for itself many times over in the first year alone.
Same data, retained. Right tier, finally.
Real cost reduction, real retention compliance, real archive that's still retrievable.
The cheapest storage problem is the one you stop overpaying for.
Most SharePoint storage overages aren't a growth problem — they're a tiering problem. Years of completed projects and retention-bound records pile up in storage built for collaboration, and the monthly overage charges keep climbing. By using GS RichCopy 360 Enterprise's date filter to move only files older than 5 years to Azure Blob, this construction company stopped paying SharePoint rates for cold data — and kept every archived file accessible for as long as the retention rules require.
Paying SharePoint overages for files no one opens?
GS RichCopy 360 Enterprise's date-based file filter selects exactly the cold data that belongs in archive storage — and moves it to Azure Blob, on-prem NAS, or any supported destination, while leaving active work in place.