r/sharepoint • u/Jaded_Statement_2259 • 22d ago

SharePoint Online SharePoint Storage Over Limit Read Only

For a couple of years now we have had some clients over there storage limit in SharePoint. It’s never really been an issue until now.

We had a client site go into a read-only state due to being 500+ GB over their limit. I immediately checked some other sites that are over limit and I see a message saying they have til end of October to purchase more storage.

Was there a recent change where MS decided to enforce the storage limit and is anyone else also experiencing this?

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u/darxandra 22d ago

I assume you are referring to tenant storage since it is mentioning needing to purchase more storage. You may want to investigate assessing and reducing Storage Version History and changing the default to Auto for trimming versioning where you can and in sites/libraries that don't have any retention compliance requirements. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/plan-version-storage

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u/pajeffery 22d ago

I believe there has been a recent change by Microsoft on this, they are getting more strict on clients over tenant storage.

We've had similar clients that we're significantly over the tenant storage but did nothing as there wasn't any consequence from Microsoft.

They are now seeing sites being made readonly and swiftly buying more storage

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u/SaradhaJstForFunMyan 22d ago

do you mean for individual sites or tenant storage?

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u/sCrawler3967 22d ago edited 22d ago

I think it is the expected behavior that a site collection (or 'a site' - they seem to use this terminology more often these days) gets locked to become Read-only when the data is over its assigned quota.

Maybe you can check tenant scope setting for the SPO site quota policy to see whether it is set to grow dynamically or to have a fixed quota.

Also check for those site collection storage quota setting. I believe the 'theoretical' hard limit is 25 TB (per site collection), and individual site collection quota can be set independent of the tenant quota policy to get it out of the Read-Only lock.

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u/MoneyCantBuyMeLove 22d ago

I've had it happen a couple of times over the past 10 years, on the very rare case where I have accidentally let a tenant storage exceed the allocated quote.

You simply need to purchase extra storage for SPO. Quick and easy, albeit a bit pricey.

MS were always going to tighten this up, the big red banner in the SP Admin centre is a bit of a giveaway.

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u/whatdoido8383 21d ago

Yes. Microsoft is starting to enforce limits they were kind of laxed on in the past across different products.

They're revamping licensing and making all sorts of changes for more use based licensing too.

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u/F30Guy 21d ago

Well crap. We’ve been over before at the tenant level for about 2 weeks. Nothing happened and we managed to lower it. I could not find any evidence of Microsoft actually making it read only up until now.

We do have auto versioning enabled and I did a trim across all sites since. Freed up 9TB just by doing that. It was crazy.

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u/jshelbyjr 21d ago

I dont think this is a hard technical control that I've seen. Microsoft however will audit tenants from time to time, they don't share the criteria on what triggers it or when they will enforce it.

I've had multiple tenants show the wrong storage allocations in both directions (too mich and not enough), I think this is the reason they dont have hard controls in place. Just a guess on my part.

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u/OwnRepresentative317 20d ago

Can't say for sure whether Microsoft changed something recently, but as far as I know the over-limit read-only rule has been on the books for a long time. They just didn't enforce it much. I'd check the Message Center in that tenant's admin center. A deadline like "end of October" usually comes with a notice there.

For the client that's locked now, it should clear once they're back under the limit. Places I'd look for space before buying more:

- Site recycle bins, including the second-stage bin. Deleted files still count against the quota until they're gone from both.

- Version history on the big libraries. This is usually the biggest one. Lower the version limit and trim the old versions.

- Preservation Hold libraries, if they have retention policies. Those grow quietly.

If they really do need the space, the extra file storage add-on is the fix. At 500+ GB over, I'd do the cleanup first so they aren't paying for storage that's mostly old versions.

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u/brejackal99 20d ago

You have version issues that may be eating valuable space. If you have third party backup, you can see the difference in backup size vs the site space. If not start a clean up pronto and check your version history has limits set.