Site Discovery & Classification
Discovery builds the site inventory used by Estate Explorer, backup selection, scope assignment, and scheduled backup targets.
Discovery
An authorized administrator can start discovery from Estate Explorer. If an admin opens a tenant with no cached sites, the portal can start discovery automatically.
The service queries Microsoft 365 for SharePoint sites and excludes site URLs that are not intended for normal collaboration backup, such as personal and system paths. It also walks classic subsite hierarchy up to four levels deep when SharePoint returns those webs.
Classification
Classification is a separate background stage that enriches discovered sites with information used by the portal, such as site type, hub relationship, and parent-site context.
The portal shows discovery and classification progress separately. Type and hub filtering should be treated as incomplete until classification finishes.
Cached inventory
The tenant stores its discovered-site inventory. Refreshing the portal does not intentionally clear it. An administrator can clear the inventory from Settings & Access → Danger Zone with Purge Sites. Purging the inventory does not delete backup versions.
A new discovery can refresh the inventory. The service may return an already-fresh result instead of starting another discovery immediately.
Site list filters
Depending on available classification data, Estate Explorer can filter by:
- Source, such as discovered or custom
- Backup state
- Site type
- Hub relationship
- Site name or SharePoint URL path
Export
Estate Explorer can export the current filtered inventory to an Excel workbook. The exported columns reflect the data currently available for each site, including classification and backup summary fields when present.
Permissions
Discovery changes tenant-wide cached data, so it is an admin operation. Scoped managers can work with the sites their role allows but do not run tenant-wide discovery.