SharePoint Storage Usage Report: Get an Accurate Picture
If you're a Microsoft user, SharePoint is most likely your document storage tool of choice, not least because it’s bundled with your 365 licencing. It's a feature rich product that can be implemented quickly and efficiently and used with the minimum of fuss as you need very little technical expertise to use it.
That’s on the front end, of course. The back end administration of a tenant isn't quite so simple, and if we're being completely honest here, Microsoft could do things that make our lives easier. And the number one thing I'm talking about here is monitoring your storage. It shouldn't be that hard to report your storage metrics, but I guess if you're reading this, you already know it's not that simple.
How to get a quick SharePoint storage usage overview
There are various ways to access and identify how much storage you are taking. The first and simplest way is, as a site admin, go to the storage metric section of a given storage site. That will show you the subsites, libraries, folders and allow you to drill down to the individual file sizes. Now wouldn't it be nice if you could simply export that to give you a site level report? Unfortunately, Microsoft says no.
So our second option is to go to the admin centre and check on the site sizes there. This will give you the ability to see, at the tenant down to the site level, the amount of storage you are consuming. This is great as an overview, but it doesn't tell you the granular detail you might want to know in order to administrate the sites, so this is not the answer either.
Viewing SharePoint storage usage via PowerShell
Our next option is to use PowerShell (PS) to interrogate the environment. As a scripting language, PS gives you a lot more power to find what is going on in your tenant. If you are tech savvy, you can script it out yourself or take a shortcut - indeed, one can go to ChatGPT (other LLM's are available) and ask it to produce a script that tells me all the detail about their tenant and like magic, you can now identify everything that’s going on in the tenant.
But wait. The numbers don't add up to the admin centre numbers? Well… that will be because it doesn't take into account the versions that are in place on different files (and there can be a LOT of versions) - so again, we're back to the drawing board.
Third party tools as an option for SharePoint storage usage
Next up - third party reporting tools. These will work absolutely perfectly - they'll tell you all about SharePoint and probably tell you a lot of stuff you don't even need. But it comes at a monthly cost, and considering its telling you something that SharePoint itself should really be able to tell you, it's not a very satisfactory solution.
Custom console app as a solution for a SharePoint storage usage report
That’s where we come in. We've gone through all of the above and been frustrated by it, so because of that we've built our own script to get this information. The caveat is that it needs to be a console app because the only way to get the information you require is by using the graphAPI, but once set up to run it will trail through your tenant and get out all the document information that you need in one CSV file. At that point, you can then build your own reporting from it to administrate your tenant. This can be easily done via Power BI or a similar reporting tool.
But wait! It does more. You want to free up space by deleting those versions? Sure thing - it can do that for you too, so you don't need to manually delete those versions (thus saving your sanity). It may take a while to execute, depending on the number of files and version size, but it can save you tons of storage in the long term.
If you would like to analyse your SharePoint storage in detail and see exactly how much versioning might take up of your space, don’t hesitate to contact us – we are happy to advise you.
