How to Archive a Team in Microsoft Teams (2026)

How to Archive a Team in Microsoft Teams

Archiving a team stops all activity in it while keeping the content readable. In the Teams admin center, select Teams, click the team name, select Archive, optionally tick "Make the SharePoint site read-only for team members", and confirm. The team moves to the Archived list, where members can still view and search its channels, files and chats, and an admin can reactivate it at any time.

What archiving does not do is free up any storage, which is the thing most admins are actually trying to achieve when a project ends. This guide covers the archive process, what happens to the SharePoint site behind the team, the difference between archiving and deleting, and what to do if the real goal was reclaiming space.

What Happens When You Archive a Team

Per Microsoft's documentation, archiving a team means:

• All activity for that team ceases. No new messages, no new posts in channels.
• Private channels are archived too, along with their associated site collections.
• Content stays viewable and searchable. Members can still open the archived team and read channels, files and chats.
• Membership stays manageable. You can still add or remove members and update roles on an archived team.
• It is reversible. Archived teams can be reactivated.

During archiving you get one option worth understanding: "Make the SharePoint site read-only for team members." Ticking it prevents members editing content in the team's SharePoint site and Wiki tab. Team owners can still edit that content either way. If you leave it unticked, the team is archived but its underlying SharePoint site remains writable, which is rarely what people expect.

How to Archive a Team: Step by Step

You need to be a Teams service admin for the admin-center route.

1. In the Microsoft Teams admin center, select Teams.
2. Select the team by clicking its name.
3. Select Archive.
4. To lock the underlying content, tick Make the SharePoint site read-only for team members.
5. Select Archive to confirm.

The team's status changes to Archived. It appears temporarily under Hidden teams at the bottom of the teams list with a small archived-state icon, and once removed from there it lives in the Manage teams view under Archived. To read or search an archived team's content, select its name in that list.

Team owners can also archive their own team from the Teams client without admin involvement, which is worth knowing if you are trying to work out why a team disappeared from someone's active list.

How to Unarchive a Team

Reactivating is the same path in reverse:

1. In the Teams admin center, select Teams.
2. Select the team by clicking its name.
3. Select Restore.

The status change back to Active can take some time, and the team is not automatically moved back into the user's Your teams list, so tell people where to find it.

The Catch: Archiving a Team Does Not Free Storage

This is the part that catches storage-conscious admins out, and it follows directly from how archiving works. An archived team keeps its content viewable and searchable, which means the content is still there. The SharePoint site behind the team still exists and still consumes your tenant's storage quota.

Archiving a team is a governance action, not a storage action. It stops activity, tidies the teams list, and prevents further edits. It does not reduce your SharePoint storage consumption by a single gigabyte, and it does nothing about the tenant hitting its quota and triggering SharePoint overage charges at $0.20 per GB per month.

If your motivation for archiving a pile of dormant teams is the storage bill, archiving alone will not move the number.

Archive or Delete: Which One

Deleting is the only built-in action that actually removes the content, and it is far less reversible than people assume.

	Archive a team	Delete a team
Content	Stays viewable and searchable	Channels, files, chats and site collections deleted
Storage consumed	Unchanged	Released once deletion completes
Reversible	Yes, reactivate any time	Only by restoring the Microsoft 365 group, within the 30-day soft-delete window
Under retention	Not affected	Sites under retention are not deleted until the retention period expires

Microsoft's own guidance is to archive first and postpone deletion until you are certain, precisely because a deleted team cannot be directly restored. What you can do is restore the underlying Microsoft 365 group, which by default is retained for 30 days after deletion. Restoring the group brings back the team's content, tabs, standard channels, and private channels with their site collections. It can take up to 24 hours to complete.

The PowerShell path, using the Microsoft Graph module, is Get-MgDirectoryDeletedItem to find the soft-deleted group and note its Id, then Restore-MgDirectoryDeletedItem -DirectoryObjectId [Id] to bring it back.

Past 30 days, there is nothing to restore.

If the Goal Was Reclaiming Storage

When dormant teams are the symptom and the storage bill is the problem, there are three real options.

Delete the team. Free, effective, and permanent after 30 days. Suitable when nobody will ever need the content and no retention obligation applies. The risk is obvious: teams get deleted, and eighteen months later someone needs the contract that lived in one of them.

Microsoft 365 Archive at the site level. Microsoft's native cold-storage tier can hibernate the team's SharePoint site at a reduced storage rate. It works, but reactivation is administrator-initiated and can take up to 24 hours, it carries a per-GB reactivation charge, and archived content is excluded from Microsoft Copilot. There is also a documented limitation with Teams: a site connected to a team that has private or shared channels cannot be cleanly archived - the main site archives while private and shared channel sites stay active. The detail is in Microsoft 365 Archive vs Squirrel.

Archive the content at file level and keep the team usable. Squirrel archives the inactive documents inside a team's SharePoint site into Azure Blob Storage in your own subscription, leaving a stub in place. The team stays active and browsable, the files still appear where they always did, and any member restores one in a single click, immediately, with no rehydration wait and no restore fee. Because the data lands in storage you own at Cool-tier rates rather than SharePoint's overage rate, the storage bill actually falls. Squirrel covers content across standard and private channels, and archived files stay visible to SharePoint Search and Microsoft Copilot through Nutshell AI summaries.

The practical pattern most enterprises land on: archive the team for governance, and archive its documents for storage. They solve different halves of the same problem.

Frequently Asked Questions

What happens when you archive a team in Microsoft Teams?

All activity in the team stops, including in private channels and their site collections, but the content stays viewable and searchable for members. You can still manage membership and roles, and you can reactivate the team at any time. Optionally you can make the associated SharePoint site read-only for members during archiving.

Does archiving a team free up storage?

No. The team's SharePoint site still exists and still consumes your tenant's storage quota, because the content remains readable and searchable. Archiving is a governance action rather than a storage one. To reduce consumption you have to delete the content, use Microsoft 365 Archive at the site level, or archive the documents to lower-cost storage with a tool such as Squirrel.

Can you unarchive a team?

Yes. In the Teams admin center, select Teams, click the team name, and select Restore. The status change can take some time, and the team is not automatically returned to members' "Your teams" list.

Can you recover a deleted team?

Not directly. You can restore the Microsoft 365 group behind it within the default 30-day soft-delete window, which brings back the team's content, tabs, standard channels and private channels with their site collections. Use Get-MgDirectoryDeletedItem and Restore-MgDirectoryDeletedItem in the Microsoft Graph PowerShell module. The restore can take up to 24 hours. After 30 days the team cannot be recovered.

Should I archive or delete an unused team?

Microsoft recommends archiving first and postponing deletion until you are sure, because deletion cannot be directly undone. Archive when the content may still be needed or is under a retention obligation. Delete when you are certain it is disposable, remembering that sites under retention are not removed until the retention period expires.

Can members still access files in an archived team?

Yes. Members can open the archived team from the Archived list and view and search its channels, files and chats. If the SharePoint site was made read-only during archiving, they can read but not edit those files, though team owners can still edit them.

Related reading

• How to export a Teams chat - getting a conversation out in readable form, including after someone has left.
• Microsoft 365 Archive vs Squirrel - the site-level native option compared with file-level archiving.
• How to archive a SharePoint site - the site-level equivalent for the SharePoint side.
• Office 365 Extra File Storage: cost and alternatives - what the storage you are trying to reclaim actually costs.
• SharePoint Online archiving: the complete enterprise guide

Archive for Governance, Archive for Storage

If dormant teams are really a storage problem, see how Squirrel archives the documents inside them into your own Azure storage while the teams stay usable. Questions: sales@smikar.com.