What are the different ways to modify the users OneDrive for Business storage quotas?

Did you know there are multiple ways to update or modify your user’s OneDrive for Business? In this blog post, we’re going to go through 3 methods! Hopefully that will give you sense of where to go depending on your role/permissions within Microsoft 365.
 

Microsoft 365 Admin Center

Probably the most obvious way is the Microsoft 365 Admin Center.

If you navigate to Users > Active users, you can select a particular user by clicking on their name, and then a panel/blade opens on the right handside. By clicking on the OneDrive tab, we have a glimpse of the storage used by the user compared to his/her allocated quota, and also the settings for the Organisation.

By clicking on Edit, we can manually change the storage quota for that user from 2 options:

• Same as organisation’s default limit per user
• Maximum storage for this user

Choose one option, and then click on Save.
 

The storage displayed in parenthesis under the “Same as organisation’s default limit” is defined in the SharePoint Admin Center. This is our next method! 😁  

SharePoint Admin Center

If you are a Global Admin or a SharePoint Admin, you can go to the SharePoint Admin Center to modify the users OneDrive for Business storage at the Organisation level. This means it will affect all users if their storage is set to default to the Organisation (like we’ve seen in the options above).

Under the Default storage limit, I have to admit that Microsoft did a good job at explaining what needs to be entered. The clearer the better!
 

When this value (1024GB in the screenshot above) is changed, it will be reflected in Users > Active users > select user > Edit > Same as organisation’s default limit per user

PowerShell

Our last option is… scripting. If you live in the Microsoft ecosystem and an admin/ITPro, you should be familiar with PowerShell.

Using PowerShell will get you the best of both worlds! You can change the users storage quotas in bulk (even only one user but that’s not the point of PowerShell 😅), and you can also change the Organisation settings. We can use any of those 2 modules to accomplish that task:

• SharePoint Management Shell (by Microsoft)
• PnP PowerShell (open source)

I will be biased by saying “use the PnP PowerShell” module (because I’m one of the maintainers 😁) and if your organisation allows installing from open source, but if you do, I have just the script for you in one of my Github repos: Set-UserODFBStorageUsingCSVFile.
 

Conclusion

Just to recap where to go for what you need to do:

• Use the Microsoft 365 Admin Center if you need to individually update only a couple of users
• Use the SharePoint Admin Center to change the Onedrive for Business storage quota at the Organisation level
• Use PowerShell to do both of the above + update users in bulk!
   

Thanks for reading!