Replacing Root site - Impact on Site collections

K-MailMom What type of site is your current root site? If it is already a Communications site, it might be less work to just create the new hope page in the existing Sitepages library and make the new page the homepage.

If that is not an option, does your existing root site have subsites? My understanding is the archived just means read-only, so they should still be attached to the old root site after the swap.  The old root site will be given a new url. SharePoint will tell you the new url after the swap and everything should be available.

If the document libraries need to be at the root, you will need to migrate them. I recommend using a migration tool, like ShareGate to ensure all of the metadata for your documents is preserved. Because you have lots of document, you can do a "Copy only" migration, which might take a while.  After that you can do incremental jobs that will only update the files that have changed since the last job. Do one of these right before you do the swap to ensure you have the latest file versions available.

Good luck! -Don

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