Open up your firm's SharePoint, Dropbox, LucidLink, or Egnyte account and look at how much of it is projects that wrapped up two, five, ten years ago. Chances are it's a lot — and chances are nobody's opened most of those files since the final invoice went out.
That's not a knock on your firm. It's just what happens. Nobody wants to be the one who deletes a closed project, so everything stays exactly where it landed: in the same expensive, high-performance storage you use for the job you're actively working on today.
"Introducing Huntertech Vault: a web-based archive for completed projects, $40/TB/month CAD, available to our managed clients. Move a closed project there and your team can still get to it in minutes — you're just not paying active-collaboration rates to store it."
Why It Piles Up
There are good reasons to keep old project files around. Professional retention obligations, marketing and RFPs, company history, and the odd client who calls three years later asking for a drawing — all real reasons to hang onto the record. None of those reasons require the file to sit in the same tier of storage as this week's active project.
Retention Obligations
Professional and regulatory requirements mean you're keeping the record either way — they don't require it in premium active storage.
Marketing & RFPs
Old project photos, renders, and specs get reused for years after the project closes.
The Occasional Callback
A client or insurer asks for a drawing from a project that closed years ago — rare, but real.
But that's exactly what happens by default. SharePoint, Egnyte, LucidLink, and most file servers are built — and priced — for active collaboration: fast sync, version history, real-time access from anywhere. All of that is genuinely useful for a live project. It's wasted on a project that closed in 2019 and gets opened once a year, if that.
The Actual Cost
This isn't really a technology problem, it's a cost problem. You're paying premium per-terabyte rates to store files that behave more like a filing cabinet in the basement than an active workspace. As a firm grows and racks up more completed projects every year, that storage bill only goes one direction.
We see this constantly with architecture, engineering, and construction firms specifically, because the file sizes are so much bigger than typical office documents. A handful of completed Revit projects with linked models, renders, and point cloud scans can eat through a terabyte on their own. Multiply that across a decade of project history and you're paying a lot every month just to keep old work "available" in a system built for something else entirely.
SharePoint Extra Storage vs. Huntertech Vault: 2TB Example
| Storage Option | Rate | Monthly Cost (2TB) |
|---|---|---|
| SharePoint extra storage | $0.32/GB/month | ~$640/month |
| Huntertech Vault | $40/TB/month CAD | $80/month |
There's also a limit that has nothing to do with cost. Microsoft recommends the OneDrive sync client not sync more than 300,000 files across all synced libraries — past that, sync gets unreliable: files silently stop syncing, teammates don't see new files show up, and the sync client starts throwing errors. AEC firms hit this ceiling faster than most, because every project throws off thousands of small files — PDF sheets, renders, point cloud exports, RFIs. Moving closed projects to Vault isn't just about the bill — it keeps your active library well under that ceiling.
Treat It Like a Lifecycle, Not a Pile
The fix isn't deleting anything — it's separating active storage from archive storage, the same way you'd separate a working file from something going into long-term records. Active projects stay exactly where they are, with all the collaboration features you need. Closed projects move to a cheaper tier built for occasional retrieval instead of daily use.
That's the gap we built Huntertech Vault to close. It's a web-based archive for completed projects — $40/TB/month CAD, available to our managed clients. Move a closed project there, and your team can still log in and download whatever they need whenever a client calls or an insurer asks for records. You're just not paying SharePoint or Egnyte rates to keep it "active" when nobody's touched it in years.
What This Actually Looks Like
For a mid-sized firm, this usually means going through project storage once, sorting by last-modified or project-close date, and moving anything past a certain age into the archive. It's a bit of housekeeping up front, then it's mostly automatic — new projects close, they move over, active storage stays lean.
The result: your primary storage carries only what your team is actually working on, your monthly software bill reflects that, and you can still put your hands on any old project file in minutes if you ever need to.
Note: Huntertech Vault is available to Huntertech managed IT plan clients. If you're a managed client and want help figuring out what to move and when, get in touch and we'll walk through it with you.
