Managing SharePoint Online storage is no small task! Don’t worry. I’m here to help!
This is a clip from my full Configuring and Managing SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business course available on Pluralsight that goes in-depth into managing the full SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business services.
Video Summary
Here are the key points from the video:
- Cloud Storage Benefits: One of the main advantages of using cloud services like SharePoint and OneDrive for Business is that you don’t have to manage storage hardware, just the licensing.
- SharePoint Storage Calculation: SharePoint Online storage is pooled and depends on the number of licensed users. Each organization starts with 1 TB plus an additional 10 GB per licensed user.
- Managing SharePoint Storage: You can manage SharePoint storage either automatically, where each site can use up to 25 TB, or manually, where you set specific limits for each site.
- Monitoring Storage: Storage usage can be monitored through the SharePoint Online admin center or using PowerShell commands. You can also set notifications for site owners when storage limits are nearing.
- PowerShell for Reports: PowerShell can be used to create detailed storage reports, showing storage usage and quotas for all SharePoint sites, helping to keep track of storage consumption effectively.
For more information, read the transcript blog below, or watch the video above!
Video Transcript
Let’s start by covering the basics of storage for SharePoint and OneDrive for Business. One of the benefits of the cloud is not having to manage storage hardware, especially with software as a service products. There’s nothing to manage except licensing. When it comes to storage, SharePoint and OneDrive for Business have different ways of licensing storage. At a high level, in SharePoint Online, the included storage depends on the number of licensed users in your tenant. For OneDrive for Business, most enterprises have unlimited individual cloud storage, though there are some limitations.
Starting with SharePoint, the total storage for the organization depends on the number of licensed users for SharePoint in your tenant, known as pooled storage. The formula is one terabyte to start with, plus an extra 10 gigabytes for each licensed user. For example, if your organization has 200 licensed users, you would get one terabyte plus 200 times 10 gigabytes, totalling around three terabytes. You can check this in the SharePoint Online admin center on the active sites page.
There are some limitations, such as field worker licenses (Microsoft 365 F1 and F3 or Office 365 F3) not granting the 10 gigabytes per license increase. To manage storage in SharePoint Online, you can choose between automatic and manual strategies. The automatic option sets the storage limit for all sites to 25 terabytes, even if your tenant doesn’t have that much available storage. It’s up to you to monitor sites to ensure one site doesn’t use all the storage. You can monitor storage using the admin center or PowerShell.
If you choose the manual option, you can set specific limits for each site and configure notifications for site owners when they reach a certain percentage of their storage limit. This can be done from the active sites page in the admin center or using PowerShell with the set-SPOsite cmdlet. PowerShell can also be used to create reports, such as listing all SharePoint sites with their storage usage and quotas, sorted by storage usage.
Finally, let’s move on to OneDrive for Business storage.
