SharePoint Content Archiving

Question

i am just wondering how the SharePoint professional are planning their content Archiving. I have about 2 Tb of the Data which includes MS documents,excel,PowerPoint, PDFs and other doc formats.

We are using SharePoint 2007.

There are some old contents which are about 4 years old and i am thinking about archiving those content in a well mannered for future use if required and makes the life of end users more easier. The benefits are they will find contents what they are looking for. there are lots of docs and search will throw a long list in results.Also they don't have to struggle to manage the really old stuff.

Most of the content in my organization is worked on the financial year/Project base and after the financial year/projects finish Out of those content nearly 70% are not going to be reused and it needs to archive.

Thanks in Advance

Answer 1

You could also use the Record Management features of SharePoint. Using information policies you could use a retention policy on your relevant content types to move data to a Record Management site.

Read more on record management features and how to plan for their use in SP2007 http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262114(v=office.12).aspx

Answer 2

You have many third party options, most of which use EBS (External Blob Storage).

This allows documents and other binary data to be stored on a file server outside the content databases. Usually a placeholder is inserted into the content DB to allow metadata to be stored and allow search to crawl these documents.

Implementing EBS in MOSS is not a simple task which is why there are quite a few third party products.

Alternatively, I have seen an identical farm (as far as updates go) used as an archived storage centre. Sites /libraries can be moved from the production farm to the archive farm. This increases support/admin work, but can be an effective solution.

Answer 3

I know of one site that implemented this Metalogix product, which is compatible with MOSS 2007 farms:

http://www.metalogix.com/downloads/StoragePoint.aspx

The downside is you will need to install its services on all WFE servers and have to factor it into your DR plan. The product was fairly good at what its intended to do and you can apply various filters on document types and particular site collections. I have found that if for some reason one or more of its services don't run then your farm is offline which is quite nasty. Although I'm talking about a version several years old, the latest one is probably pretty robust these days.

Answer 4

Check this solution out:

http://jasear.wordpress.com/2012/09/13/archiving-documents-in-sharepoint-2010/