Best practices for storage management
Beginning at a school’s next contract renewal, but no sooner than August 1, 2024, all school tenants will receive 100 TB of free pooled storage across OneDrive, SharePoint, and Exchange, with additional pooled storage per paid user, depending on your subscription.
This article summarizes the recommended best practices for information and storage management. For a more holistic guide to managing your data, check out our information lifecycle and storage management whitepaper
| Best practice | Description |
|---|---|
| Monitor storage in OneDrive, SharePoint, and Exchange | Track storage consumption across your tenant to identify top consumers and optimize your schools' storage resources. Learn how to view pooled storage usage and limit |
| Monitor and manage inactive users and groups | Monitor and remove inactive users and groups that are no longer needed to optimize your Microsoft 365 tenant's storage capacity. |
| Enable limits across OneDrive, SharePoint, and Exchange | Manage unexpected growth in Microsoft 365 storage by setting customizable limits on SharePoint Sites, Mailboxes, and OneDrive. |
| Enable Teams meeting recordings retention settings | Automatically delete old Teams meeting recordings by setting meeting recording retention times. |
| Enable archive mailboxes | Provide users archive mailboxes for older emails that must be retained for regulatory or legal purposes and enable Archive policy to automate the process of moving older mail to the archive. |
| Enable Exchange deletion policies | Automatically delete outdated or unnecessary data, such as expired contracts, old emails, or spam messages, by defining retention periods and deletion settings. |
| Enable and configure versioning in a SharePoint list or library | Track and manage information over time with versioning in lists and libraries, as well as view and recover previous versions from the item's history. |
| Encourage end-users to move files from school accounts to personal accounts | Transfer files to your personal OneDrive with the Mover Transfer Wizard |
| Configure retention policies for Exchange emails and public folders, SharePoint sites, and OneDrive accounts | Determine the settings to proactively retain content, delete content or both (retain and then delete the content. Learn more about creating retention policies. |
| Enable SharePoint version control | Create a historical record of change that enables the end user to view, delete, and restore a version if they have the correct permissions in the library or list. Learn more: - Version history limits for document libraries and OneDrive - Planning for version storage for document libraries - Versioning best practices |