M365 developer subscription issue

Discussion & Solutions
9

:package: Where the 5 TB came from, and what your tenant allows now

@Wantok — you signed up through one of the 5 TB threads on this board (the A1 Plus route, the 1tb.fun route, the EDU route). Microsoft set separate caps for Developer Program tenants since then:

OneDrive per user      10 GB
SharePoint, pooled    300 GB
Extra from the SKU      0 GB

The 5 TB was the commercial E5 formula that the dashboard still shows. The backend enforces 300 GB pooled, and that is still 30× the 10 GB you are sitting at. :bullseye:

:magnifying_glass_tilted_left: If your files went read-only, it is ghost storage

Pooled means OneDrive + SharePoint + Exchange together. Your live files look small, and four things count at full size while staying invisible:

  • Preservation Hold Library — a hidden library that any retention policy or eDiscovery hold creates. It copies every deleted and modified file. Scope the policy out and it empties itself
  • The second-stage recycle bin — items sit there 93 days and count the whole time. Empty both stages by hand
  • Version history — a 10 GB library quietly becomes 50 GB. Trim in bulk:
New-SPOSiteFileVersionBatchDeleteJob -Identity https://<tenant>.sharepoint.com/sites/<site> `
  -DeleteBeforeDays 30 -Automatic
  • A deleted user’s OneDrive — keeps counting for 93 days. Shorten that with Set-SPOTenant -OrphanedPersonalSitesRetentionPeriod 30

Where to look: admin.microsoft.com → Reports → Storage gives the top consumers and a CSV of every site. Usage recalculates every 24–48 hours, so a read-only lock lifts a day or two after you are back under.

:compass: Using the 300 GB properly

OneDrive is capped per user by the licence, so the space lives in a SharePoint site library, which draws from the pool. Mount it and it behaves like a drive:

The mount recipe — one site, one drive letter
  1. SharePoint admin centre → Active sites → Create → Communication site
  2. Give it the pool explicitly:
Connect-SPOService -Url https://<tenant>-admin.sharepoint.com
Set-SPOSite -Identity https://<tenant>.sharepoint.com/sites/devdrive `
  -StorageQuota 307200 -StorageQuotaWarningLevel 280000

307200 is 300 GB in megabytes. PnP.PowerShell runs the same from a script.

  1. Mount with rclone — new remote → onedrive → “sharepoint” → your site URL, then:
rclone mount sp: X: --vfs-cache-mode full

WinFsp on Windows or FUSE-T on macOS makes X: appear in Finder or Explorer like any other drive. A complete macOS write-up covers the LaunchAgent too, so the mount returns after a reboot.

:wrapped_gift: What the program is worth now

Twenty-five E5 licences: Office desktop apps, Exchange, Teams, SharePoint, and 300 GB of shared storage behind them. The software is the value in 2026 — the drive was the perk that changed. The board’s own closure note called this months ago, and the licences are still worth having.

As admin you also hold every lever above: the quota, the version cleanup, the orphaned-site window. That is a ten-minute cleanup followed by a 300 GB library you actually control. :package: