Can people still open files when the tenant is read-only?

Microsoft describes read-only mode as people being unable to add or modify content. It does not describe blocking people from opening what is there, so expect work to stall rather than files to vanish.

How long does Confirm purchase give us?

Up to 14 days, while the capacity you bought is applied. It can be used once in a 365-day period.

How fast can Shed take files out?

Most sheds are running within a week: the first day to register Shed Sweep in your tenant, the second to list what it would move, and the rest of the week to copy and verify the first library before anyone approves the removal.

How long do you have to keep business records?

The common periods

These are the usual general obligations, a starting point for your accountant or solicitor, not advice; your industry may impose longer ones.

Australia: five years for most tax and financial records under the Income Tax Assessment Act and the Corporations Act, running from when the record was prepared or the transaction completed. Seven years is the common rule of thumb because some records, including employee records, run longer.
United Kingdom: six years from the end of the accounting period for company records under the Companies Act, and six years for VAT. Many firms round to seven for the same reason.
Employment records generally outlast financial ones, and in some cases, such as records relating to workplace exposure, run to decades.
Anything under dispute, investigation or legal hold is kept until that ends, whatever the ordinary period says.

What people keep that they do not need to

In most archives the records you are obliged to keep are a small fraction of the volume. The rest is working material: drafts, exports, renders, versions of the same deliverable. It stays because deleting it needs somebody to take responsibility for it.

The cost of keeping it is invisible until the tenant fills up.

A sensible policy

Name the categories you are obliged to keep and for how long. Usually finance, contracts, employment, and anything regulated.
Keep those properly: readable, searchable, provable, with a second copy.
Everything else gets a default: finished work moves out of the working system after a set period, and is kept because it is cheap to keep, not because it is required.
Write it down. A policy you can show is worth more in a tender than an archive you cannot explain.

Keeping it without paying live prices

Records you must keep and are unlikely to open are the clearest case for an archive. They do not belong in the system your team works in every day, at the quota you pay a premium for, and they do not belong in a frozen tier where getting one back takes a day and a support ticket.

Shed holds them at half what Microsoft charges for extra storage, searchable by name and inside documents, snapshotted nightly and copied a second time. When somebody needs the invoice from 2019, it opens in a browser.

Talk to us about what you are keeping, or read the difference between archive, backup and cold storage.