Dataverse storage audit checklist
Before you buy capacity, delete records, or evaluate any tool, spend an hour finding out what your Dataverse storage actually holds. This checklist walks the whole audit: reading the capacity report, working out what the attachment tables contain, and choosing a response you can defend. It pairs with our walkthrough of the capacity report itself.
You need a tenant admin, Power Platform admin, or Dynamics 365 admin role to see the reports.
Read the report
Get the facts before any conclusions. All of this lives in the Power Platform admin center.
The capacity picture
Open the Power Platform admin center and go to Licensing, then the Dataverse capacity view.
Record your entitlement and consumption for each capacity type: database, file, and log.
Note which type is closest to its limit, and whether you are already in overage.
Drill into your production environment and open consumption per table.
Write down the top five tables by size for database and for file capacity.
Check the growth trend on each: steady climb, recent spike, or flat.
Understand what the attachment tables hold
If Attachment or AnnotationBase is near the top, the storage question is really a document question, and the next pass is about content, not bytes.
The content pass
Sample a few dozen note attachments across teams. What are they: scanned agreements, signed letters, working files, images?
Ask each team that attaches files to notes what they attach and why.
Flag any attachment categories that are documents of record: agreements, signed correspondence, anything your retention schedule names.
Flag categories that are genuinely transient: screenshots, drafts, duplicates.
Check whether any of the documents of record exist anywhere else, or whether the note holds the only copy.
Note who relies on finding these later: audit, counsel, gift officers, records staff.
Choose a response
With the facts in hand, the options sort themselves. Be honest about which problem you have.
The decision
If growth is slow and the content is low-stakes, more capacity may be the right bridge. Note the date to revisit.
If the pile is transient files, a cleanup with clear rules beats any tool. Confirm retention obligations before deleting anything.
If cost is the whole problem, evaluate the attachment extractor category with a storage destination.
If the attachments include documents of record, evaluate destinations that make them searchable and governed, not just cheaper.
Whatever you choose, confirm it handles the backlog, not just new attachments.
Set a reminder to re-read the capacity report in six months and check the trend actually bent.
The comparison, when you get there
When the audit points at moving attachments out, the realistic options differ more in destination than in mechanics. We compare all four honestly, including where each beats us, in four ways to deal with Dynamics 365 attachment bloat. And if what your audit found is years of scanned agreements on notes, that is the exact case the PaperlessZen™ extraction was built for: the note keeps rendering its file, and the archive makes it findable and governed.
Book a demo and bring your top-five table list. We will tell you plainly which parts of it we help with.