Storage Spring Clean

Teams meeting recordings are one of the bigger culprits when it comes to taking up a lot of space without you realising. We highly recommend looking through your Recordings removing those which are no longer required.

Depending on how you set up the meeting you recorded, the files may be stored within individual “Chat” conversations, or in Teams Channels themselves (usually as part of recurring meetings).

Deleting Meeting Recordings from Teams Channels

1. Open a Teams Site you have regularly recorded meetings in (you may also need to select the corresponding Channel from the left sidebar).
2. Select the “Files” tab at the top of the window.
3. Select the “Recordings” folder.
4. Delete any recordings which are no longer required. To make things easier, sort them by date by clicking on “Modified” and selecting “Older to newer” to place your oldest recordings at the top.

Deleting Meeting Recordings from Chat Conversations/One-off meetings

1. Open OneDrive by clicking on the OneDrive icon in the taskbar and selecting “View Online”, or by visiting onedrive.lincoln.ac.uk and signing in.
2. Select “My Files” in the left sidebar.
3. Select the “Recordings” folder.
4. Delete any recordings which are no longer required. To make things easier, sort them by date by clicking on “Modified” and selecting “Older to newer” to place your oldest recordings at the top.

Once you’ve deleted any recordings you no longer require, we recommend following our Keeping on top of Meeting Recordings guide in our Tips & Tricks for the Future section.

Tip: Remember to check for duplicated files across Teams and OneDrive.

One of the biggest areas you will likely need to sort through in terms of storage is OneDrive. Take some time to look through files stored in your OneDrive and delete anything you no longer need.

Tip: We highly recommend breaking this activity into chunks and repeating as required.

1. Open OneDrive by clicking on the OneDrive icon in the taskbar and selecting “View Online”, or by visiting onedrive.lincoln.ac.uk and signing in.
2. To get a full list of your storage usage, click on the settings cog (top-right) and select “OneDrive Settings”.
3. Click “More Settings”.
4. Select “Storage Metrics”.
5. Click on “Documents” and this will show your largest folders.
6. Make a note of the largest folders or files. This will allow you to target the largest areas in your storage first.

Deleting files

1. Head back to the main OneDrive page by clicking on “OneDrive” at the top-left (or by visiting onedrive.lincoln.ac.uk).
2. Click on “My Files” in the left sidebar.
3. Use the search bar to find folders you’ve made a note of in the section above.
4. Open the folders, and sort by file size by clicking on “File Size” and selecting “Larger to smaller”.
5. Delete files you no longer need.

Tip: A quick way to delete multiple files/folders at once is by hovering over and selecting the circle tick box on the left side of each file you want to delete, then clicking “Delete” or pressing the “Delete” key.

You can also select all files in a folder by selecting the circle tick box at the top left of the folder table.

If you have any old Teams sites you no longer require, we recommend thinking about deleting them altogether. Make sure you copy any important files stored in them first before deleting the site itself.

1. Open Teams and select “Teams” in the left sidebar to view all Teams you are a part of.
2. Click on the three dots “…” next to the “Join or create team” button at the top-right.
3. Select “Manage teams”.
4. Click on “Membership” at the top of the table to sort the Teams you are the Owner of to the top.
5. Delete any Teams that you are the Owner of (that you no longer require) by clicking the three dots “…” on the right hand side, then selecting “Delete Team”.
6. Read the information displayed, then check the box which, and select “Delete Team” if you are happy to delete the Team.

Please Note: Deleting a Team will also delete any files (including meeting recordings) stored within it.

When deleting emails, we recommend the first place to look should be the “Online Archive” folder.

1. Open Outlook.
2. Look for the “Online Archive – JBloggs@lincoln.ac.uk” folder in the left sidebar (where you would find your Inbox, Deleted Items etc.), and click the small arrow on the left to expand its contents.
3. You will see a list of folders that have been automatically archived. These folders will contain any emails linked to your account that are over 2 years old.
4. Click on each folder and go through and delete any emails you are happy to remove.

To delete an entire folder in your Online Archive, right click on any folder and select “Delete Folder”. This will move the folder to your “Deleted Items”.

You will then need to delete all items from your “Deleted Items” folder to complete the process.

Once you’ve done this, we recommend setting up policies to automatically delete archived emails after a set time limit. We have a full guide on this in our Tips & Tricks for the Future section.

To help prevent old, deleted and unwanted emails from clogging up your storage in future, you can set a policy on a folder which will automatically delete emails after a set period of time.

1. Open Outlook.
2. Look for a folder in the left sidebar (where you would find your Inbox, Deleted Items etc.).
3. Right-click on a folder you wish to set a policy for.
4. Select Properties and then click on the policy tab.
5. Select the “Folder Policy” you want to apply to the folder, e.g. “1 year delete”.

This will set the folder to automatically delete any emails which fall under the conditions of the policy you select. You can set this up on multiple folders.

We recommend setting a recurring meeting/reminder in your Outlook calendar for every 3 months to check your meeting recordings and delete any that are no longer required.

Please Note: Digital Services are currently looking into the possibility of creating a policy which automatically deletes Teams recordings over a certain age. If this were to be set up, we would include an option to allow users a chance to override it. We will provide further updates if this is implemented.

It’s worth remembering that even if files are deleted, they aren’t always completely gone from your storage straight away.

OneDrive

Deleting files in OneDrive moves them to the built-in Recycle Bin. This Recycle Bin is automatically emptied every 90 days, but if you’re trying to free up space quickly, try checking in there to remove any previously deleted files.

Tip: After 90 days in your regular OneDrive Recycle Bin, files will move to a Second Stage Recycle Bin for another 90 days – you can access this at the bottom of the screen in your Recycle Bin.

Outlook

In Outlook, deleted items will go into your “Deleted Items” folder. Remember to delete any you no longer need again.