Allocated SharePoint Storage 


Every tenant with Office 365 or Microsoft 365 subscriptions automatically gets 1TB of SharePoint storage for the whole organisation, not including the storage allocated to individual users OneDrive. If your tenant has any of the below subscriptions, you receive an additional 10GB of storage per license purchased: 

  • Microsoft 365 Business Basic/Business Standard, Business Premium, Teams Essentials 
  • Microsoft 365 E3/E5 
  • Office 365 E1/E3/E5 
  • SharePoint Plan 1 or 2 

 

The frontline worker licenses and standalone licenses such as Exchange Online, are not eligible for the additional 10GB/license storage.  

The storage is pooled for the tenant, so all SharePoint sites draw from the pool of the tenants total allocated SharePoint storage. You can view the total allocated and consumed storage for a tenant in the SharePoint Admin Center on the ‘Active Sites’ page: 

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The storage usage that appears in the SharePoint Admin Center does not update straight away, so any changes that are made in the last 24-48 hours are not reflected here.  

If you think that the allocated storage that appears in the SharePoint Admin Center is incorrect and  you should have more storage, you can run the Tenant Storage diagnostic test which will identify any issues with the tenant storage quota and breakdown how the quota is allocated.  

 

SharePoint Storage Limits 


There is a maximum storage limit of 25TB for each individual SharePoint site (previously called a site collection) – this is not the amount of storage that is allocated to a SharePoint site. This is a technical limitation, so even if you more than 25TB storage available to use, a single site cannot exceed that limit. Once a site hits the 25TB limit, it becomes read only until items are removed (by deleting items and deleting from recycle bin) and the storage consumption drops below 25TB again. You can manually set the storage limit to be lower if you want to prevent a single site from consuming more than a desired amount of storage.  

 

Purchase Additional SharePoint Storage  


If you need more storage than what is allocated to your tenant (1TB + 10GB per eligible license), you can purchase the Office 365 Extra File Storage add-on license. The extra file storage add-on only provides storage for SharePoint, you cannot use it to purchase extra storage for OneDrive.  

 

Stock Code 

Description 

P1M:CFQ7TTC0LHS9:0001 

MS NCE O365 EXTRA FILE STORAGE 1MTH COMMIT 

P1Y:CFQ7TTC0LHS9:0001 

MS NCE O365 EXTRA FILE STORAGE 1YR COMMIT 

 

The Office 365 Extra File Storage add-on can be added to any of the following subscriptions: 

  • Microsoft 365 Business Basic/Standard/Premium 
  • Microsoft 365 E3/E5 
  • Microsoft 365 F1/F3 
  • Office 365 E1/E3/E5 
  • Office 365 A3 (faculty)/A5 (faculty) 
  • SharePoint Online Plan 1/Plan 2 

 

Each Office 365 Extra File Storage add-on license provides an extra 1GB of storage (1 license = 1GB storage), so if you need to purchase 100GB of extra storage, you need to purchase 100 add-on licenses. If you think the SharePoint storage requirements may fluctuate or the customer only temporarily requires additional storage, I’d recommend purchasing the 1 month commit subscription. 

Once you’ve purchased extra storage, it automatically gets added to the SharePoint storage pool for the tenant. 

 

Recycle Bins & Storage 


SharePoint sites recycle bins are part of the tenants total SharePoint storage limit. When you delete files from SharePoint they are not immediately permanently deleted – they go to the recycle bin for a period of time or until they get manually emptied from the recycle bin. This is to enable users to easily recover items if they get accidentally deleted.  

There are two recycle bins – the first-stage recycle bin (the site recycle bin), which is accessible by users, and the second-stage recycle bin (the site collection recycle bin), which is only accessible by site collection admins. When an item is deleted from SharePoint, it goes to the first-stage recycle bin and stays there for 93 days. If a user deletes an item from the first-stage recycle bin, it goes to the second-stage where it stays for the remainder of the 93 days or until it’s permanently deleted from the second-stage recycle bin. After the full 93 days is up, regardless of whether the item resides in the first or second stage recycle bin, it is permanently deleted.   

If a customer is near to using up all their allocated SharePoint storage, consider reviewing how much space is being used by the recycle bin and empty it regularly to free up space. 

 

Retention Policies & Storage  


Similarly, retention policies have an impact on SharePoint Storage as content that is being retained is held in the Preservation Hold library which uses tenants overall allocated SharePoint storage. Retention policies can retain content for a period of time, retain then delete it, or just delete it.  

When the policy is configured to retain and delete, when content is modified or deleted a copy of the original content is created in the Preservation Hold library. It remains in the Preservation Hold library for the entirety of the retention period that’s been defined in the policy (e.g. five years), and at the end of the retention period it is moved to the second-stage recycle bin in which it is retained for a further 93 days before being permanently deleted. If the content is not modified or deleted during the retention period, at the end of the retention period it follows the normal deletion process and goes to the first-stage recycle bin at the end of the retention period and is retained for 93 days (or if purged from the first-stage recycle bin, then is retained in the second-stage recycle bin for the rest of the 93 days), then is permanently deleted.  

When a policy is configured to retain only, if the content is modified or deleted during the retention period, a copy of the original content gets created in the preservation hold library where it’s held until the end of the retention period. At the end of the retention period the copy that lives in the preservation hold library gets moved to the second-stage recycle bin where it’s kept for 93 days before being permanently deleted (the original copy that lives in the document library is not deleted). If it’s not deleted or modified during the retention period, nothing happens, and the document remains as is in the document library.  

For this reason, it’s important to consider how retention policies may be impacting storage usage, and review whether the policies accurately reflect the customers’ requirements. Data should not be retained for the sake of being retained. Retention policies should be designed carefully and intentionally to meet business and legal requirements, compliance obligations, and make sure no personally identifiable information (PII) is retained longer than it should be.   

 

OneDrive Storage 


Most M365/O365 subscriptions include 1TB OneDrive storage by default, except for the frontline worker licenses which only include 2GB of OneDrive storage. Subscriptions that include OneDrive Plan 2 allow you to increase a user’s OneDrive storage to 5TB, these include: 

  • Microsoft 365 E3/E5 
  • Office 365 E3/E5 
  • OneDrive Plan 2 

To increase a OneDrive storage to 5TB, you must have 5 or more users with one of the above licenses. If you have less than 5 users with a license that includes OneDrive Plan 2, they are only allocated 1TB of OneDrive storage and that cannot be increased. After the user is licensed with OneDrive Plan 2, their storage is updated within 24 hours after they access their OneDrive.   

If you need more than 5TB of OneDrive storage, you can request additional storage by contacting Microsoft Support. Before contacting support, you must need the following requirements:  

  • 5 or more licenses that includes OneDrive Plan 2. 
  • At least 1 license must be assigned to a user. 
  • At least 1 user must have used 90% of their allocated 5TB storage. 

 

You can manually set the default OneDrive storage space for users, but you will not be able to set it to a value above 1TB unless you meet the licensing requirement. If you set it to a value lower than the users OneDrive storage usage, their OneDrive will become read-only. You cannot reallocate OneDrive storage to SharePoint sites, and vice versa. You also cannot reallocate a user’s spare OneDrive storage to another user.  

 

Archive SharePoint Sites with Microsoft 365 Archive 


M365 Archive is a new product Microsoft have released in public preview in November. It offers a low-cost, cold tier storage option SharePoint. With M365 Archive, you can archive in-active SharePoint sites so that they no longer consume the tenants SharePoint storage quota, and instead you pay for the archive storage consumption on a pay-per-GB basis. Once a site is archived, users can no longer access the site contents, however it is still searchable using the admin search and can be accessed with Microsoft Purview. 

It’s important to note that archiving is currently only available at site-level, however according to Microsoft’s blog file-level archiving is expected to be coming to the product in the second half of 2024.  

M365 archive uses PAYG model meaning you are billed based on consumption and the charges go to an azure subscription, so you must link your Azure subscription to Microsoft Syntex before you can enable the archive service. For instructions on setting up M365 archive see the documentation here.  

You are charged on a per-GB basis for the storage and reactivation of data. For storage, you are only charged if the tenant has exceeded its allocated active SharePoint storage quota, if there is still storage space available, you won’t incur any additional costs for archived sites. However, with site reactivation, you are charged if you reactivate a SharePoint site after 7 days of it being archived, regardless of whether the tenant has consumed all it’s SharePoint storage or not. There is a 7-day grace period so if you reactivate the site within 7 days of it being archived, you will not be charged.  

Customers will save costs with this product if they are not reactivating more than 30% of their data twice a year as illustrated by this table: 

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Microsoft 365 Archive is still in preview meaning that it may not be available for all tenants yet while it’s still rolling out, and you should review the preview limitations and T&Cs before deploying it to any customer tenants.  

 

Storage for Education Customers 


Microsoft is changing the storage for Education customers to a pooled storage model starting 1st August 2024. At the customers next renewal after 1st August 2024, they will receive 100TB of free pooled storage to be used across Exchange Online, SharePoint, and OneDrive along with an additional 50GB or 100GB extra pooled storage for every paid A3 or A5 purchased (excluding student use benefit licenses).  

The 100TB pooled storage (plus additional pooled storage from eligible paid licenses) will be the maximum amount of storage that all users combined can use for Exchange, SharePoint, and OneDrive. For Exchange, the storage includes user, shared and group mailboxes. Archive, public and discovery mailboxes are not included.  

Additionally, starting 1st February 2024 users with an Office 365 A1 license will be limited to only using 100GB of OneDrive storage from the tenants pooled storage quota.  

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This is a technical and licensing limit, so it will be enforced starting 1st August 2024. Microsoft does not believe that introducing this storage model will have a significant impact, as most education customers do not exceed their storage allocation (99.96%). Microsoft will provide additional storage at no additional cost for mid-term customers exceeding the limit until the end of term after 1st August 2024.  

Admins will receive notifications when the tenant storage capacity reaches 80% and 90%. If the tenant reaches 125% capacity after 1st August 2024, OneDrive and SharePoint will become read-only (meaning users can’t upload, edit, or sync new files). If Office 365 A1 users exceed the 100GB limit after February 1st, 2024, their OneDrive will become read-only. 

 

For more information can be found in the below resources: