Mad Props!

We had a requirement at work this week which had a few people bamboozled: How can we “archive” a SharePoint document library to CD so that auditors could take it off site? It only needs to be a read-only copy, but it needs to include not only the documents themselves, but any “metadata” custom columns that the site owner has added to the library.

We tried a few different options, but nothing seemed to do what we wanted. A lot of people I asked suggested Groove, but after dicking around in Groove for a while, I couldn’t find how to access the “metadata” for any file that it had downloaded. In the end we settled on a fairly simple solution, which I will document here for future reference.

Note: I’m blurring out the data in these screenshots. Not because it’s overly sensitive, but mostly because I want to focus on the “how” rather than the what. Also I couldn’t be bothered constructing a “fake” document library just for the purpose of this blog post. ;-)

First, open the document library in a view that contains all the “metadata” columns you want to export and click Actions|Export to Spreadsheet:

Your list will open in Excel, and the first column will be a hyperlink back to the original document on your SharePoint server:

Add a new column (I like to make it the second column), and insert the formula into the first data cell:

=HYPERLINK(A2)

You’ll now have a second column of hyperlinks, but the links won’t go anywhere because they only link to a filename, rather than a full path:

Because there is no path on the hyperlinks in the second column, Excel will look for the linked file in the same folder as the spreadsheet itself. So now all you need to do is save that spreadsheet to a folder, and also save all the files out of the document library itself into that same folder! I like to call the spreadsheet “index.xlsx” so it’s clear that this is the index for all the documents.

Do you have an easier way to save an offline, archived copy of a document library? If so, I’d love to hear it! Leave me a comment!