Running out of M365 storage? Here is a 30-minute checklist that usually reclaims 10-20%
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SharePointReclaimPlaybook

Running out of M365 storage? Here is a 30-minute checklist that usually reclaims 10-20%

When the SharePoint quota alerts start firing, buying more storage is the expensive answer. Here is a pragmatic checklist that gets most tenants back under quota without deleting a single business-critical file.

LogiSam EngineeringThe team behind TSO01 Aug 20269 min read

The SharePoint pooled-quota alert has a way of arriving on a Friday afternoon. Buying more storage is the quick answer, and Microsoft is quite happy to sell it to you. Reclaiming is the cheap answer, and if you know where to look most tenants have 10-20% sitting in obvious places.

The 30-minute checklist

  1. Empty the site collection recycle bins on your top 20 largest sites. That alone often frees several TB — anything deleted more than 30 days ago is still occupying quota until you empty the second-stage recycle bin.
  2. Find sites without an owner. In every tenant we have scanned there is a long tail of sites created for one-off projects five years ago; the owner has left; nobody notices. Archive them.
  3. Trim version history on document libraries where nobody uses versioning. The default is 500 versions per file. On a 250 MB InDesign file that is 125 GB per file.
  4. Cull orphaned OneDrive accounts. When a user leaves, their OneDrive is retained for 30 days by default. Extend the retention if you must, but export and delete once the leave date is confirmed.
  5. Look at the Teams meeting recordings folder. Recordings older than the retention policy that were never watched are the single easiest reclaim target — and they were probably never governed in the first place.
  6. Kill unused site templates and default site collections created by demos, sandboxes, or POCs that never went live.

What TSO does that manual checklists cannot

Steps 1-6 are things a determined admin can do in an afternoon per site. The problem is scale — an enterprise tenant has hundreds of sites, and the reclaimable bytes are not concentrated in the top 5. TSO gives you the ranked list and the reclaim estimate for every site in a single pass, so you can spend the afternoon on the highest-impact ones instead of guessing.