A Dynamics 365 storage audit walks through five areas in order: database size by entity, attachment and note volume, AI and Copilot-related storage consumption, audit log retention, and duplicate or stale records — before deciding whether to buy more capacity.
Most teams only start this audit after a capacity warning shows up in the admin center. By then, the growth has usually been building for months, across more sources than the obvious ones.
Storage review used to mean checking attachments and notes. Today, that’s only part of the picture.
Why storage costs sneak up on Dynamics 365 admins
Storage grows quietly because it comes from everyday activity, not one big event: emails attached to records, notes added during calls, logs retained by default, and now, AI features indexing content in the background.
None of this looks alarming day to day. It’s only when a capacity threshold is crossed — or a renewal brings a storage add-on fee — that the full picture becomes visible.
The 5-step storage audit checklist
- Check total database and file storage by entity, to see where growth is concentrated.
- Identify attachment- and note-heavy entities — often the single largest driver of file storage.
- Check storage consumed by AI and Copilot features separately. Dataverse search indexing, used by Copilot Studio agents and other AI-enabled experiences, consumes its own share of database and file capacity — and it’s easy to overlook because it isn’t tied to a record you created yourself.
- Review audit log retention settings. These are commonly left at default and can run far longer than most organizations actually need.
- Flag duplicate or stale records inflating overall record count, especially in high-volume entities like leads, contacts, or activities.
Common storage culprits
- Email attachments and notes stored directly on records
- AI and Copilot indexing and semantic search storage
- Long audit log retention with no review cadence
- Imported or legacy data that was never cleaned up after a migration
What to do with what you find
Not everything the audit turns up should be handled the same way. A simple framework helps:
- Archive what needs to stay accessible for compliance or reference, but doesn’t need to live in active storage
- Delete what’s genuinely redundant — true duplicates, failed imports, test records
- Offload what’s driving file storage specifically, such as email attachments, to a tool built for that purpose
This is where AttachmentExtractor fits directly: it’s built to move attachment storage out of Dynamics 365 without disrupting how users access those files day to day.
Frequently asked questions
A light check quarterly, and a full audit before any license renewal or planned storage purchase.
Start with an entity-level breakdown of database and file storage — it usually points directly at the biggest driver.
Not if it’s archived rather than deleted — archived data stays available, it just isn’t counted against active storage the same way.
Read the full breakdown in “Buried in Storage Fees? Here’s How to Cut Dynamics 365 Costs Fast,” and explore AttachmentExtractor for offloading attachment storage specifically.