Office 365 Pooled Storage Limit

[dan00204]

Hi everyone,

 

Has anyone suddenly realised that they are heading for a disaster with Microsoft's decision to cap the pooled storage. We have found out today that our limit is 120TB and this limit will be enforced from August 1st. We are already 56TB over that limit! Our users have A5 for faculty, A5 for students use benefit, and A1.

 

Actions I have taken:

Reduce OneDrive retention period after a user is deleted from 365 days to 30 days.

At the minute users OneDrive storage is capped at 5TB and I want to reduce that to 1TB or maybe even less starting from September, but people who are over 1TB right now will lose write access with their OneDrive going to read only.

I want to reduce the number of shared mailboxes that we have, as these also count towards our pooled storage.

 

Can anyone think of anything else that can help me reduce the 57TB surplus.

 

Thanks,

[FN-GM]

How about a retention rule to empty deleted items? Maybe automatically delete emails over 30 days old? It won’t claw back all that space but could help. Edited May 29, 2024 by FN-GM

[Rob_D]

What about SharePoint retention policies?

Or even just looking at your largest SP sites and seeing what's taking up all the space and if you can get rid.

[thimon]

We’re doing this now. Check for duplicate files in SharePoint. That was a quick win for us. Get users to empty their OneDrive recycle bin including second stage bin. Lower recycle bin auto deletion rate. 5TB??? Ours are currently 1TB but will probably be brought down dramatically. Outlook via web has a great tool to empty large folders, via settings, general, storage.

[jmak]

We realised a while ago, but we're still heading towards a crunch.

 

We've set OneDrive quota at 100GB. We've had to help out with reorganising into SharePoint and that has helped because lots of people have saved copies of the same files in their OneDrive. We've also had to empty a lot of Preservation Hold Libraries.

 

Just be careful not to permanently delete stuff you're required to hold and make sure that the changes don't result in people copying data to USB drives.

 

And maybe consider that you'll need to buy additional quota from Microsoft....

[Netwacky87]

And maybe consider that you'll need to buy additional quota from Microsoft....

 

Have you seen how pricey extra storage is?! I nearly fell off my chair!

[Steve21]

Can anyone think of anything else that can help me reduce the 57TB surplus.

 

I'd say the first point is where/why are they using all that space.

 

To put that in perspective 120TB would be 400 staff licensed with A3/A5 (100TB + 50GB per user). That's an average of 300GB per staff being used even after your other 57TB reduction (ignoring students for now, considering most the storage is normally in department areas etc). We've got 600+ staff licensed with A3 (131~TB limit) and are barely hitting 30TB across all staff/students.

 

If you haven't used it before they added new storage reports under - https://admin.microsoft.com/Adminportal/Home?#/storagemanagement - which shows where all the storage is allocated including by product/user etc. You may find a few select people are abusing it for personal storage etc or archives of archives etc and a lot could be freed up easily. Run the "top users" reports etc to see who it might be

 

As others mentioned, why do you have 5TB allowances set? If it's that high and it's being used its likely that staff are replicating files in individual drives rather than using shared areas etc - For example 10 copies of a media file instead of using shared team with it in etc

 

Steve

[dapaulio]

Yeah we found this also from our customers renewal this year a1 licensed users take the default 100gb limit whilst a3 and a5 is 1tb increasing to 5tb.

 

So a1 free licence has 100tb pooled limit therefore 1500 user school will be 80gb /user which is significant but not beyond the realms with some kids who take photography maybe hitting that average limit

A3 is 100TB + (50gb x # paid a3 licences)

A5 is 100TB + (100gb x # paid A5 licenses)

 

Student use in benefit DO NOT add to the pooled limit but will still use the pooled storage.

Based on my understanding

 

So my schools have on average to have 100 a3 license and 20 a5 licenses therefore

 

100000 + (50x100)+ (100x20)

100000 + 5000 + 2000

= 107000gb or 107tb of storage

Therefore my 1500 users have an average limit of 71gb each

 

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/education/products/microsoft-365-storage-options#:~:text=With%20pooled%20storage%2C%20an%20institutions,tenant's%20100TB%20of%20pooled%20storage.

 

 

On one site we were close to our pooled limit so thought of ways we could recover some storage and found a lot in OneDrive downloads. Maybe worth redirecting downloads to local pc profile rather than OneDrive

The second was people deleted items within their mailbox. Found that there wasn’t a retention tag on deleted items.

Between these two it released a significant amount of space where most user were below the average limit

The third was the photography student had 1000’s of high res raw images and it those who we found exceed the average limit.

Subscriptions still using A1 will be a problem I guess but I can’t see this being a problem really as they all moving to a3 and a5 licenses.

 

We will see

Edited May 29, 2024 by dapaulio

[thimon]

Ooo. Version history! Check using storage metrics. I found a lot of the largest files were actually caused by file version history. A single PDF file took up 45GB even though it was a 300MB file, as it had so many versions.

[dapaulio]

Ooo. Version history! Check using storage metrics. I found a lot of the largest files were actually caused by file version history. A single PDF file took up 45GB even though it was a 300MB file, as it had so many versions.

 

Ooo hadn’t considered this thanks

[Jamman960]

Go speak to PE, I managed to recover just under 600gb from 1 user(they’re no longer #3 in the trust ) following a brief meeting… just need to tackle their 2.2tb shared drive now

[thimon]

Def PE, and also for duplicate files. There were recordings of whole matches, duplicated in separate folders for each student.

[Rob_D]

Drama are another one to check out. I guess because both Drama and PE film students for assessment and then that needs to be kept just long enough people forget its there.