SharePoint storage full: what is using it and how to get space back

Your SharePoint admin centre says the tenant is near or over its storage. Here is what is usually in there, how to see it, and what gets space back without buying more.

How much storage a Microsoft 365 tenant has

Every tenant gets a shared SharePoint pool of 1 TB plus 10 GB per licensed user. A 25-person business has 1.25 TB for all of its SharePoint sites and Teams files together. OneDrive is separate: each person gets their own 1 TB (on most business plans), and it does not count against the pool.

To see where you stand: SharePoint admin centre → Active sites. The bar at the top shows the pool, and the list shows each site's size. Sort by storage used; the top five sites are usually most of the problem.

What is using it

In the tenants we have looked at, the space goes to the same things:

• Versions. SharePoint keeps every saved version of a file, in full, and the default limit is 500 versions per file. A 20 MB deck edited fifty times is a gigabyte. Versions do not show in the file list; they show in the site's storage metrics.
• Recycle bins. Deleted files sit in the site recycle bin and then the second-stage bin for 93 days in total before Microsoft deletes them. Until then they count against the pool. Emptying a bin is the one thing that frees space the same hour.
• Copies. "Copy of", "(1)", "FINAL", "FINAL v2", the same document saved as both Word and PDF, the same attachment uploaded to three channels. In a company drive, copies and versions of the same document are typically 10 to 20% of the files.
• People who have left. When a user is deleted, their OneDrive is kept for 30 days by default and then removed, but what they copied into sites stays forever, often in folders nobody opens again.
• Media and archives. Site photo libraries, recorded meetings saved to SharePoint, zip exports and database backups someone parked "for now".

What frees space

In order of effort:

1. Empty the recycle bins of the biggest sites (both stages). Space comes back as soon as the second-stage bin is empty; anything in it is gone for good, so look first.
2. Trim versions. Set a sensible version limit per library (Library settings → Versioning), or turn on Microsoft's automatic version history for the tenant, which thins old versions by age. Trimming applies to new saves; existing versions go when you delete them or when the automatic rule reaches them.
3. Remove duplicate and near-duplicate files. Identical files and old versions saved under new names are the part you can take out without losing anything, because a copy remains. Doing this by hand across sites is slow and risky: you cannot tell by name which of three "Proposal.docx" files is the one people link to. A tool that compares the files' contents, keeps the right one and moves the rest to the recycle bin (where they stay restorable for 93 days) is the safe way. That is what Doppelgone for Work does, and the audit that shows you the numbers is free.
4. Deal with departed users' files. Transfer ownership of what is still needed, archive the rest to a cheaper tier or a cold site.
5. Archive, do not delete, what you must keep. Microsoft 365 Archive keeps whole sites at a lower price per GB than active storage, with a reactivation fee if you bring one back.

What it costs to do nothing

Extra SharePoint storage ("Office 365 Extra File Storage") is about $0.20 per GB per month at list price. A tenant 500 GB over its pool pays about $100 a month, $1,200 a year, for files it mostly does not need. Our guide on what extra Microsoft 365 storage costs works through the numbers.

What Doppelgone for Work does

A free audit connects to your tenant with read-only access, takes an inventory of every site and OneDrive, and finds identical files, the same document in other formats, old versions and near-identical documents. The report shows what can go safely, what needs a look, which libraries and people it belongs to, and the departed-staff and version-sprawl picture. Nothing is changed. If you go ahead with a clean-up, your reviewers approve every group, removals go to Microsoft's recycle bin, and anything can be restored for 93 days; after that Microsoft deletes it, not us.

Start the free audit · How the setup works · What we can and cannot see