What is the most common mistake organizations make when storing records in SharePoint or a shared drive?

The single most common mistake is treating SharePoint or a shared drive as a storage location rather than a records system. Files are dumped into folders and left there indefinitely, with no retention rules, no consistent metadata, and no plan for eventual disposition. The platform becomes a digital landfill: everything is kept, nothing is governed, and finding the authoritative version of anything becomes guesswork.

Why this goes wrong

A shared drive or a default SharePoint library will faithfully hold whatever you put in it, but it does not, on its own, know which files are records, how long they must be kept, or when they may be destroyed. Without deliberate governance, several problems compound over time:

• No retention or disposition. Content accumulates forever. Records that should have been destroyed years ago remain discoverable in litigation and audits, while records that must be preserved sit unidentified among the clutter.
• Inconsistent metadata. When organization depends only on folder names and personal habits, classification breaks down. Two people file the same kind of document in three different places.
• Weak version and integrity control. Multiple near-identical copies make it hard to prove which version is the official record and that it has not been altered.
• Uncontrolled access and oversharing. Broad permissions and open links expose sensitive or personal information.

What good practice looks like

The international standards ISO 15489 and ISO 16175 frame the fix: design the environment so records are captured with enough content, context, and structure to remain trustworthy, and apply governance from the start rather than after the mess accumulates.

In practice that means:

• Define a file plan and apply a retention schedule so content has a defined lifecycle, including disposition.
• Apply consistent metadata (content types, labels, or categories) instead of relying on folder structure alone.
• Set access controls by role and review sharing regularly.
• Maintain audit trails and version history so you can show what the official record is and that it is intact.

The underlying lesson is that storage is not management. A drive or collaboration site only becomes a reliable recordkeeping environment when retention, metadata, and access are designed in deliberately. See the electronic records management hub for related guidance.