Forum Discussion
Best way to fully delete a SharePoint/Teams site?
I'm curious, what's the best way to fully delete a SharePoint or Teams site?
We need to do this form time to time to reclaim storage space in our tenant, specially for sites that are no longer in use (We do archive the site first though). Currently, for SharePoint this is what I do
1. From SPO admin center, delete the site
2. Use the PS command Remove-SPODeletedSite to fully delete it
What I've been doing in Teams is:
1. Delete from Teams admin center
2. Go to Azure and into delete groups, then permanently delete the group.
Are these the best practice ways to fully delete SharePoint and Teams sites to fully reclaim that storage back?
Thanks.
3 Replies
- So Best practice is to use the group expiration policy, and let the user decide if they want to keep the team or delete it. Other than that any place where you can delete a group works, such as Admin, Azure, Teams, SharePoint etc.
As you're deleting something that belongs to the group, the whole group will go with it.
But my main recommendation is to look over why you're having storage issues, probably you have large files with alot of verison history, which is recommended to be cleared and lowered.- Oh I agree. Unfortunately, we don't have a governance policy in place on sites, something I am working towards to help with the expiry of unused sites properly.
These are old sites that have not been touched in years, so I'm looking to clean up what we can manually so we don't run out of space in our tenant.- Fully understand, I've been there with multiple clients! This is my approach!
First to buy yourself time, sort SharePoint by storage and go into those sites and see what is taking up space, I promise you. You will have files that are 100gb+ due to them being on version 200+ and the file being 1 GB (1gb x 200 Versions = 200gb space taken up). Clean up as much as you can from this.
After that I would go out to the organisation and notify them that you will be deleting old sites and Teams. This should include a status and justification.
Then create a flow which get's all the sites and it's members and save it to a SharePoint list (Just to make it easier).
Have it send out an email to all the owners of sites that are older than two years if there's any relevant information on those, Yes or No. If yes is pressed, they need add justification!
You will mostly get no and those sites are ready to be deleted.
Those who don't respond you send out an reminder 2-3 times. Then you contact them manually.
Just so you don't step on any toes! 🙂
