But what if the Permanently delete option is greyed out like this?

That’s because the Primary admin of the site is still set as the Group owners. You can’t purge the sites that still have any connections to the M365 groups. So, you can either restore the site and change the primary owner to an individual user and then delete it again, or better, you can take advantage of the power of PowerShell.

Install-Module -Name Microsoft.Online.SharePoint.PowerShell
Connect-SPOService -Url https://tenent-name.sharepoint.com
Remove-SPODeletedSite -Identity site_url

It works like a charm, except if you are trying it in PowerShell 7, in which you won’t be able to connect to the SharePoint Online service. Check out this to see how to get around it.

Install-Module -Name Microsoft.Online.SharePoint.PowerShell

It works perfectly in PowerShell 5 but failed miserably in PowerShell 7. It throws an error when trying to connect to SharePoint Online.

The workaround is to use import the module in a compatible mode.

Import-Module Microsoft.Online.SharePoint.PowerShell -UseWindowsPowerShell

But if you only have PowerShell 7 or install the module in PowerShell 7, you won’t be able to import the module in the compatible mode, because no valid module file was found in any module directory.l

You will have to specify the location of the module file to import it. By default, you should be able to locate the installed module from the following location.

%userprofile%\Documents\PowerShell\Modules\

Then run the following cmdlet and you should be all set.

import-Module "%userprofile%\Documents\PowerShell\Modules\Microsoft.Online.SharePoint.PowerShell\16.0.23710.12000\Microsoft.Online.SharePoint.PowerShell.psd1" -UseWindowsPowerShell

To view the total and available free storage space currently for your organization, go to Active sites in the SharePoint admin center, and check the numbers at the top right corner of the page.

So how is the total number calculated in the first place?

According to SharePoint Limits, if you are a small business, you probably get 1 TB plus 10 GB per license purchased. But the math doesn’t really add up here. I don’t actually have 170 licensed users in this tenant. So it still seems to be a mystery to me.

Now that I am almost out of the space. I have two choices, either pay an additional monthly fee to get more space or delete some old sites to free up more space.

If you choose to go with the latter, you will need a detailed usage report to see where to begin the process.

In Admin Dashboard, go to Reports > Usage, and click View More under SharePoint activity.

Switch to Site Usage, and you will see the detailed usage of each site listed a little bit down the page.

However, for privacy concerns, both Site URL and Site owner columns are concealed. The report actually is useless with all concealed numbers and letters. To avoid that, you will need to go to Settings > Org settings, click on Reports, and uncheck the option “Display concealed user, group, and site names in all reports”.

Once done, refresh the Site Usage page and click on the Export button to download the usage list.