Squirrel Admin Guides for SharePoint Archive

This section is for the administrators who deploy, configure and run Squirrel. It is organised by what you are trying to do rather than by where the setting lives, so start from the task.

Evaluating Squirrel

• Proof of concept walkthrough - the whole round trip in order: policy, test site, buttons, archive, restore, and what to show at the readout.

Set Squirrel up

• Global settings - the tenant-wide defaults: age thresholds, minimum file size, excluded file types and labels, wildcard exclusions.
• Site settings - which sites are archived, and per-site size and status.
• Site custom policies - where one site needs different rules from the tenant default.
• Excluded libraries and paths - keeping specific libraries, folders and filename patterns out of the archive.
• Retention settings - how long archived files are kept before deletion, per sensitivity label.
• Restore confirmation thresholds - the size at which a restore asks for confirmation first.
• Console access and roles - who can see and do what.

Run it day to day

• Dashboard - the archive overview and what each figure means.
• Archived files - find an archived file and restore it, singly or in bulk.
• Archive and restore by path - act on a whole folder rather than a whole site.
• Activity monitor and restore queue - what is in flight now.
• Orphaned files - archived files whose original location no longer exists.
• Recycle Bin capture - recovering something a user deleted.
• File history - the one place to answer "where did this file go?" when you are not sure whether it was archived, deleted or orphaned.

Understand what users see

• Stub files - the placeholder left in SharePoint, and how it behaves.
• Restore process - what happens when a user clicks restore.
• Version history - what is preserved through an archive and restore cycle.

Report and diagnose

• Reports - the downloadable CSVs, including per-site figures.
• Cost Allocation - live and archived storage costs charged back to departments.
• Charge storage costs back to departments - setting up Cost Allocation, step by step.
• Analytics - storage, activity and cost trends over time.
• Log viewer - diagnosing a specific job.
• Limitations - what Squirrel does not do, worth reading before an escalation.

Related sections

• Nutshell AI - AI summaries written into stub files.
• Burrow - the security and audit layer, including its own tuning guides.
• End user guides - the material to hand to people who are not administrators.

Something missing from this section? Tell your SmiKar representative, or email support@smikar.com.