The renewal quote landed in Daniel's inbox with a line item he had not budgeted for: an extra storage tier, because the practice's SharePoint tenant was sitting at 91 percent of its pooled quota. Daniel is the sole IT contact at a 38-person architecture and interior design practice, splitting his time between desktop support, the practice management system, and whatever Microsoft 365 issue comes up that week. SharePoint storage had never been anywhere near his priority list, until the renewal made it one.
Finding out what was actually consuming the quota
Daniel's first assumption was that the newest, most active projects were the problem, since those generated the most rendering output. He was only partly right. Using a tenant-wide file size export through Report Master, he pulled a list of the largest files by size and sorted it against project status. A third of the top hundred files sat on projects marked complete more than eighteen months earlier.
The pattern became clear once he looked closer: rendered exterior visualisations exported at full resolution for a pitch, then never resized down after the pitch was won or lost. Scanned heritage drawing sets kept at archival resolution on every project, whether or not the project needed that fidelity going forward. And version history on presentation decks that had gone through fifteen or twenty client review rounds, each version retained at full size.
What is a large-file audit, and why start there?
A large-file audit ranks every file in a SharePoint tenant by size, independent of file type or age, so an admin can see exactly where storage is concentrated before deciding what to act on. It matters because intuition about storage use is usually wrong. Daniel expected active projects to dominate the list. Instead, forgotten exports from finished work made up a third of the heaviest items.
Step 1: Reduce oversized images without re-exporting anything
For the visualisation renders, re-exporting at a lower resolution from the original design software was not realistic. Nobody had time to reopen dozens of finished projects. Daniel used the Image Reducer inside Space Master to compress the flagged images in place, targeting the closed-project renders first. Quality held up well enough for archival reference; these were not files anyone needed at full pitch-deck fidelity anymore.
Step 2: Trim version history on the presentation decks
The client review decks were a separate problem. Fifteen to twenty full-size versions per deck, multiplied across dozens of projects, added up fast. Daniel set a ten-version retention policy through the Version Trimmer and ran it against the closed-project libraries. Active projects kept a longer retention window, since design teams still wanted to reference recent review rounds.
Step 3: Confirm the numbers before reporting back
Before telling the practice's managing partner the renewal quote could be avoided, Daniel ran a fresh storage report through Report Master to confirm the reclaimed space tenant-wide, rather than trusting the per-library estimates from each tool individually.
What changed
Tenant storage dropped from 91 percent of pooled quota to 68 percent, comfortably clear of the threshold that had triggered the renewal quote in the first place. The extra storage tier came off the table. Daniel now runs the same large-file audit twice a year, timed a few weeks ahead of the licence renewal date, rather than finding out about a quota problem from an invoice.
He also flagged one process change to the design leads: export visualisations at delivery resolution by default, with full-resolution masters kept locally rather than in the shared project site. That single habit change should slow the next round of storage growth considerably.