Did you know that you can access a report on how much space your Site Collection is using and see a list of your largest (and smallest) document libraries, documents and lists? All of this from the comfort of your web browser. The option is available from the top level site collection settings menu. It's called Storage Space Allocation. Here's a sample of what it looks like (with all the drop-down options visible):
But what if you don't see the Storage Space Allocation item in your site settings menu? Well, firstly this is only available to Site Collection administrators. You should ask the owner of the Site Collection whether you have that level of permissions or not. But more importantly, you need to have assigned a Quota to your Site Collection. This restricts the amount of disk space that your site collection can consume. Even if you don't need a quota, you will need to assign one to get access to this report.
Site Collection quotas are maintained within the SharePoint Central Administration web site. Generally this will be maintained by the IT department. Here are the steps that you need to go through to assign a quota to an existing site collection:
- Go to the Central Administration SharePoint site
- Click on Application Management in the left panel
- Select the Site Collection Quotas and Locks link under the SharePoint Site Management heading
- Make sure that the correct site collection is selected
- Select the checkbox beside Limit site storage to a maximum of
- Enter an appropriate number of megabytes for your site collection to grow
- Click OK
You will now have the Storage Space Allocation item in your site collection settings page.
