How much data & file capacity can you save by moving email content and file attachments?

3386 views 4 Updated on February 25, 2026

Please note: These numbers are based on the status of April 2023. Throughout 2023 email-content will no longer count towards data capacity impacting the potential savings. Learn more

The AttachmentExtractor for Dynamics 365 and PoweApps moves content (emails and files) from Dataverse to SharePoint or an AzureBlob. Doing so significantly reduces data and file capacity consumption. As a result, you save costs by avoiding expensive Capacity Add-ons for Dataverse.

The big question is: How much money can I save?

This article describes the steps to take to get a good idea of the potential savings for your tenant.

How to Estimate your data & file Capacity savings:

  1. First, go to the “Power Platform Admin Center” and log in to your tenant.
  2. Navigate to “Licensing” -> “Dataverse” ->”Environments“.
  3. Select your environment.
Figure 1a: Navigating to your environment
Figure 1a: Navigating to your environment
Figure 1b: Selecting your environment
Figure 1b: Selecting your environment

The following window appears:

Figure 2: Overview of data and file capacity consumption
Figure 2: Overview of data and file capacity consumption

By scrolling down, you can find and open the ActivityPointerBase, Attachment, and AnnotationBase tables and view their size.

Now you can estimate your potential savings:

  1. Data Capacity Savings: Moving email content will shrink the ActivityPointerBase table around between 35-40%. Thus, we recommend 40% for your estimate.
  2. File Capacity Savings: Moving file attachments will shrink the Attachment and AnnotationBase table between 60-90%. Thus, we recommend 80% for your estimate.
Table to shrinkSize
(GB)		Reduction*
(GB)		Cost**
(USD)		Annual savings
USD
Data capacityActivityPointerBase14 5.6 (~40%)402688
File capacityAttachment, AnnotationBase2016 (~80%)2384
Table 1: Table showing how to estimate your savings based on Figure 2

To calculate your data and cost savings, try our AttachmentExtractor Calculator.

The result

The following screenshot shows the effect of AttachmentExtractor on capacity. As can be seen, data and file capacity is reduced at considerably rates.

Graph showing the impact of AttachmentExtractor on data and file capacity. It indicates high reduction on both.
Figure 3: Impact of AttachmentExtractor on file and data capacity

To summarize: If you are tracking emails in Dynamics 365 or Dataverse you will probably find those tables to be significantly larger. Hence, savings can go up to thousands of dollars per month.

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