What's actually filling your Dataverse storage (and how to find out)

The email arrives weekly once you cross the threshold: your organization is approaching its Dataverse storage capacity. Most teams respond in one of two ways. They buy more capacity, which works until it doesn’t, or they start deleting things, which is how institutions lose records they were supposed to keep.

There is a better first move: read the report. Ten minutes in the Power Platform admin center will tell you exactly where the space is going, and the answer shapes everything you do next.

Finding the report

You need a tenant admin, Power Platform admin, or Dynamics 365 admin role. Then:

The three kinds of capacity, and why the split matters

Dataverse does not price storage as one number. Database capacity holds your structured records and is the expensive kind, around $40 per gigabyte per month at list for add-on capacity. File capacity holds file-type data and costs about $2. Log capacity sits in between and holds audit data.

Here is the detail that trips people up: attachments count mostly against file capacity, the cheap kind. Microsoft has been moving attachment data out of the database tier for years. Plenty of writing on this topic still does the math at $40 per gigabyte, and if you have read that your attachments are burning database capacity at that rate, that arithmetic is out of date. Check your own report before you believe any number, including ours.

That does not make overage free. File capacity at list is still many times the price of ordinary cloud storage for the same bytes. And when any of the three capacity types tips into overage, the problems stop being financial: admins lose the ability to create, copy, or restore environments until it is resolved, and every tenant admin gets the weekly email.

What you will probably find

On most environments that have run Dynamics for years, the same tables sit near the top:

• Attachment, which holds email attachments.
• AnnotationBase, which holds notes and their attachments. If your team scans agreements and attaches them to records, this is where those scans live.
• AuditBase, the audit log, in log capacity.
• DataverseSearch, the search index, which grows with what you index.

The first two are where the real story is, because they are not just storage. They are documents. That scanned gift agreement someone attached to a note in 2014 is sitting in AnnotationBase, counted by the gigabyte, unreadable to search, and invisible to your retention schedules.

The capacity report tells you where the bytes are. It cannot tell you which of those bytes are documents your institution promised to keep.

Three responses, honestly compared

Buy more capacity. Reasonable as a bridge, and Microsoft has raised default entitlements recently, which buys some teams a year. But it treats the symptom. The documents inside those tables stay exactly as buried as they were.

Delete old records. Sometimes right for genuinely transient data. Dangerous as a storage strategy, because note attachments are precisely where scanned agreements and signed letters hide, and bulk deletion does not check what it is deleting. If your institution has retention obligations, this is how they get breached quietly.

Move the attachments out. The structural fix. Tools exist that relocate attachments to cheaper storage and leave a working link behind, and if cost is your entire problem, they solve it. We compare the realistic options, including that one, honestly and side by side. Our view is that the destination matters as much as the move: a document of record deserves to land somewhere it becomes searchable, filed on the constituent it belongs to, and governed. That is the case we make in the Dynamics attachments workflow, where the note keeps rendering its file and the archive does the rest.

Read yours this week

Whatever you decide to do about it, the report is the starting point, and it takes ten minutes. If you want to run the full review, our Dataverse storage audit checklist walks the whole thing, from the report to the decision. If what you find is a wall of AnnotationBase and a decade of scans, that is not just a capacity problem. That is your institution’s paper history, stored where nobody can read it.

See how the Dynamics 365 integration works, read why the embed asks nothing of your gift officers, or book a demo and bring your own capacity report. We will tell you honestly which parts of it we help with and which we do not.