What the Storage Assessment Looks At
We focus on three areas to optimise Dataverse storage and reduce costs.
Consumption
What is in your tenant, and which tables, attachments and audit logs are absorbing excess capacity.
Archiving
What data could be moved to more cost-effective storage, such as Azure Blob Storage, without losing accessibility.
Retention
What stays in Dataverse but for less time, governed by policies that match your compliance position.
Where We Find Dynamics 365 Storage Savings
The Power Platform Admin Centre tells you how much you are using but not why or what to do about it. Patterns we often see include:
- Audit logs from a single migration consuming log capacity years later.
- Email attachments draining Dataverse File storage.
- Deactivated Power Automate flows accumulating excess capacity.
- Redundant tables and fields populated across thousands of records.
- Legacy attachments that could be removed or moved to archive storage.
In December 2025, Microsoft increased several Dataverse default capacities. If you activated add-on storage before that, this billed item is worth reviewing.
Estimate D365 Storage Savings
Find out how much Dataverse capacity you could free up – and any add-on costs you could avoid – with our calculator
How the Storage Assessment is Run
Following an initial discovery call, we will arrange a working session on your tenant to assess opportunities for freeing up your storage capacities, including:
Position against
capacities
Review Database, File and Log usage to assess how any paid add-ons could be reduced or removed.
Archiving and retention design
Assess if Azure Blob Storage, Dataverse retention policies, SharePoint integration, or a combination, gives the best return.
Configuration
changes
Including audit retention, Copilot transcript retention, deactivated flows, legacy field data and redundant tables.
Consumption
drivers
Including tables, attachments and system job logs - anything growing in a way that is unnecessarily consuming capacity.
Who this is for
Our storage assessment is designed for UK organisations running Dynamics 365 where any these apply:
- You have received Dataverse capacity warnings.
- You are over capacity and want to avoid buying add-on storage.
- Your existing Dataverse add-on costs are harder to justify each year.
- You plan to roll out Dynamics 365 to more people and want to understand the storage implications.
- Your Microsoft partner has completed a similar check, and you want a second opinion.
- You suspect there are data archiving options nobody has considered.
Typical Storage Savings From Our Assessments
Healthcare
£12,000/yr
A group of consultant psychiatrists and psychologists cut their database consumption by 75%.
Education
£17,000/yr
A specialist education provider reduced database, file and log capacity across their tenant.
Finance
£10,000/yr
A finance provider archived high-volume application attachments to Azure Blob Storage.
These outcomes are typical when using techniques such as moving files to Azure Blob Storage, removing legacy data, and implementing retention policies. The savings for your organisation may be higher or lower. The assessment is how we find out.
Dynamics 365 Storage FAQs
What are the Dataverse capacity types?
Dataverse is the central data storage for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform. It splits storage into three capacity types, each measured separately.
Database capacity holds your relational records – accounts, contacts, opportunities, cases and the related table definitions, including fields.
File capacity holds attachments uploaded to your records, including Word documents, PDFs, images and emails.
Log capacity stores audit data that tracks changes to records, supporting compliance and governance reporting.
Each capacity has its own default allowance and an add-on if you need more.
How does Dynamics 365 storage work?
Every tenant starts with a default capacity for each Dataverse capacity type, allocated when you buy your first qualifying Dynamics 365 licence. As of December 2025, Customer Engagement products (Sales, Customer Service, Field Service) come with 30 GB database and 40 GB file and 2 GB log capacity.
Additional Enterprise and Premium licences accrue extra database and file capacity on top of these defaults, with rates varying by product. Some products also provide increased defaults: Sales Premium adds GB above the Enterprise baseline, and Customer Insights has its own capacity model.
Administrators can monitor consumption and entitlement in the Power Platform Admin Centre, where usage trends and capacity drilldowns are available for each environment.
What happens if Dataverse storage is exceeded?
Day-to-day use continues as teams can keep creating and updating records. The disruption is felt in admin functions when capacities are exceeded: you cannot create, copy, or restore environments, and provisioning new Dynamics apps may be blocked.
Microsoft sends warnings when any capacity drops below 15% remaining, with a second alert at 5%. Once a tenant goes into overage, you can request a temporary 25% extension for 30 days, available up to 3 times within a rolling 12-month period.
That buys time to free up capacity or purchase a Dataverse storage add-on.
How can I free up Dynamics 365 storage capacity?
Several tactics reduce consumption without compromising compliance or accessibility.
Quick wins may come from cleaning up audit logs and deactivated Power Automate flows. Beyond that, retention policies can move inactive records into compressed long-term storage within Dataverse, and attachments can be moved to lower-cost destinations such as Azure Blob Storage or SharePoint.
For a walkthrough of the options and where each one applies, see our guide on freeing up Dataverse storage capacity.
If you are already paying for add-on storage, our storage savings calculator shows where you can reduce consumption and the potential cost savings.
Do I need a Dataverse storage add-on?
Buying add-on capacity is the fastest fix when you are close to or over a Dataverse storage limit. It avoids the work of cleaning up data and keeps everything in one place, but it increases your subscription cost.
The decision becomes harder to justify over time if further add-on capacity packs are needed. Dataverse is priced as a transactional database rather than a data warehouse. If a large segment of what you retain is rarely accessed, there are more cost-effective alternatives to paying the Dataverse add-on rates.
When consumption is driven by active records and live attachments, buying more capacity is easier to justify. If it is caused by old records such as deactivated flows or closed leads, audit logs, legacy migrations or significant file attachments, optimisation will typically pay back faster than any add-on.
Find out where your Dynamics 365 storage savings are
Most of our assessments identify at least one opportunity to free up Dataverse capacity or reduce costs. Sometimes a configuration change may save a few hundred pounds a year, but a data retention decision could be worth tens of thousands.