Office 365: Managing Site Storage Limits in SharePoint Online

By default, SharePoint Online uses “Automatic” Storage management to reduce administrative overheads. Each site collection gets allotted with the required storage space from the shared storage pool of the tenant automatically. When you subscribe to Office 365, you’ll get 1 TB of storage + 10 GB per-user license. Say, for example, If you have 100 user license, you’ll get 1 TB + (100 x 10 GB) =  2 TB approximately. This is called the “Storage pool” of the tenant. In the SharePoint Online Admin center, In the top-right corner of the page, you can see the amount of storage used across all sites and the total storage of your tenant.

The total storage space you get in SharePoint Online is based on your subscription and the number of licenses. Suppose you subscribed to any Microsoft 365 Business Basic, Business Premium, Office 365 Enterprise E1, E3, E5, or SharePoint Plan 1 or 2 plans. In that case, you get 1 TB plus 10 GB per license purchased! Office 365 F3 license gets you 10 GB plus 2 GB per license.

SharePoint Online: Set Storage Management to Automatic or Manual

To set the storage limits configuration in SharePoint Online Admin Center, to either automatic to manual, head on to:

1. SharePoint Online Admin Center >> Click on “Settings” from the left navigation.
2. Click on “Site storage limits” >> Set the Site storage limits configuration to either “Automatic” to allow SharePoint Online to manage the storage automatically or “Manual” to configure the storage limits manually for all sites in the tenant.

   

3. Click on “Save” when you’re finished.

Set Storage Quota for Site Collection

SharePoint automatically manages the site storage quota for each site from your tenant’s “Pooled Storage” if you selected the storage allocation method to automatic. If you choose “Manual” in the site storage management to enforce strict storage management, you can then adjust the storage quota for site collections. Here is how to set the storage limit for SharePoint Online sites:

1. From the SharePoint Online Admin center, Click on “Active Sites”
2. Select the site collection to set its storage limit. Click on the “Storage” button on the toolbar. (You’ll see the “Storage” option in the toolbar only when the storage management option is set to “Manual”!)
3. This brings the “Edit storage limit” panel to set the storage limit for the selected site collection. Enter a maximum storage value in GB. Say, You want to allocate 10 TB storage space to a site collection, enter “10240”. You can set the warning threshold as well for the site owners to get notified when it reaches the threshold value.

   

4. Hit the “Save” button once you are done. The maximum size of any Site collection is 25 TB!

PowerShell to Change Site Storage Limits in SharePoint Online

To modify the site storage limit with PowerShell, use the Set-SPOSite cmdlet. E.g.

#Config Parameters
$AdminSiteURL= "https://crescent-admin.sharepoint.com"
$SiteURL= "https://crescent.sharepoint.com/sites/HR"

#Connect to SharePoint Online Admin Center
Connect-SPOService -Url $AdminSiteURL -Credential (Get-Credential)

#Set Storage Quota of a Site
Set-SPOSite -Identity $SiteURL -StorageQuota 10240 -StorageQuotaWarningLevel 9216

To add additional storage to your Office 365 tenant, In the admin center, go to the Billing >> Click on “Purchase Services” >> Click on “Add-ons” >> Select Office 365 Extra File Storage >> Enter the number of gigabytes of storage you want to add and click on “Check out now”

My other articles to get and set storage quota of SharePoint Online site collections:

• To set storage quota for a SharePoint Online sites, using PowerShell: SharePoint Online: Set Storage Limit for a Site Collection using PowerShell
• To Generate storage quota report using PowerShell: SharePoint Online: Get Site Collection Storage Usage Report using PowerShell