New Storage Caps for Sharepoint E3 / E5 Accounts
My Microsoft 365 developer tenant didn’t just throw a cosmetic warning—mine really got capped.
The banner said the trial was ending, storage stopped at around 300 GB, and new uploads simply failed.
If you’re using your dev tenant as a poor man’s lab + file dump, this is the moment it bites you. I’ll walk through what’s going on, how I’m thinking about storage now, and why I’m looking at Backblaze B2 plus Cloudflare R2 as my go‑to combo moving forward.
When your “free” M365 dev tenant suddenly isn’t
The Reddit thread “M365 Developer Tenant – Your trial will end on 2 Aug 2026” isn’t theoretical—it matches exactly what I saw: a trial‑style banner and a hard stop on storage growth.
Historically, the Microsoft 365 Developer Program gave you an E5 dev tenant that auto‑renewed every 90 days as long as you showed developer activity; that has quietly become more restrictive.
Multiple posts and docs now confirm that:
Free E5 dev tenants for “anyone” have been discontinued or heavily limited; they’re mainly available via Visual Studio subscriptions or specific partner programs.
Some older Office 365 E3 Developer subscriptions are scheduled for termination (for example, in September 2026), forcing people to move to other SKUs.
When a dev subscription expires or is marked inactive, your tenant goes through the usual Expired → Disabled → Deleted lifecycle, with data eventually being purged and unrecoverable.
In short: my dev tenant hitting a storage cap and waving an end date isn’t a random glitch—it’s part of Microsoft tightening the screws on “free” dev environments.
The real problem: you treated a dev tenant like a storage bucket
If you’re anything like me, you probably used your dev tenant for way more than “sample apps”:
Test SharePoint sites packed with documents and media.
Exports of production‑like data for Graph/API testing.
Power Platform experiments with chunky file attachments.
That adds up fast. Once my tenant hit ~300 GB, new uploads started failing and I had no clean path to expand capacity without moving to a paid subscription or a different tenant.
Microsoft’s retention and deletion model is perfectly reasonable for a business tenant, but it’s brutal if you’ve quietly parked backups, lab datasets, and long‑term experiments in a subscription that can disappear or cap out without a smooth upgrade path.
So I stopped thinking “how do I keep this dev tenant alive?” and switched to “how do I decouple storage from M365 entirely?”
Alternatives once your dev tenant hits the wall
You basically have three categories of options:
A proper paid Microsoft 365 tenant for identity, collaboration, and “office stuff.”
Cheap object storage for backups, exports, and datasets.
Friendly sync storage for personal files and day‑to‑day use.
Here’s how I’m piecing those together.
1. A small paid M365 tenant for long‑term lab work
The most boring but sensible move is to create a Business Basic/Standard/Premium tenant and intentionally treat it as your permanent lab.
You get:
Stable licensing and predictable retention rules, with clear stages (Expired → Disabled → Deleted) instead of dev‑benefit magic.
A place to host Entra ID, Teams, SharePoint, Exchange, and whatever identity/collab pieces you actually need for long‑running projects.
I wouldn’t use this tenant as my main bulk storage pool anymore—just as the home for accounts, sites, and apps. Big files live elsewhere.
2. Cheap object storage: Backblaze B2 for bulk data
For raw storage that doesn’t care about “Microsoft 365,” Backblaze B2 is one of the cheapest mainstream options right now.
Key points:
Free tier: first 10 GB is free.
Price: around $0.006/GB‑month (≈ $6/TB‑month), with no minimum retention and S3‑compatible APIs.
Egress: free up to roughly three times your stored data via Bandwidth Alliance partners (like Cloudflare); beyond that, about $0.01/GB, still much cheaper than typical S3 rates.
Concrete numbers:
100 GB of backups ≈ $0.60/month.
1 TB ≈ $6/month.
For backing up:
M365 tenant exports (SharePoint/OneDrive PSTs, site templates, etc.).
Database dumps, application artifacts, logs.
AI/ML training datasets and model artifacts.
B2 gives me a cheap, durable bucket that doesn’t care whether my dev tenant lives or dies.
rclone support and real‑world speed
The nice bit: rclone has first‑class support for Backblaze B2. There’s an official integration guide from Backblaze and rclone’s own docs include a dedicated b2 backend.
Backblaze recommends:
–fast-list to reduce API calls.
Increasing –transfers well beyond the default 4; 16–32 parallel transfers often saturate home connections.
Tweaking B2‑specific flags like –b2-upload-concurrency for big files.
Reported speeds:
On a 100 Mbit/s link, users see around 70–75 Mbit/s (~8–9 MB/s) uploads with tuned –transfers values.
On a 39/12 Mbps connection, a ~400 GB initial backup finishes in a few days with tuned rclone params and bandwidth limits to keep the network usable.
Rclone 1.64 introduced multi‑threaded improvements that roughly tripled large‑file copy speeds compared to 1.63 in Backblaze’s own tests.
Practically: if your uplink is decent and you’re willing to tune rclone, B2 will run near line speed, which makes it a very comfortable landing zone for all the stuff you shouldn’t leave inside M365.
3. Serving content: why I’m looking at Cloudflare R2 moving forward
Backblaze B2 is fantastic for cheap storage‑at‑rest, but a lot of my use cases aren’t just backups—they’re assets served to users, APIs, or edge workloads (think voice assistant responses, generated files, dashboards, etc.).
That’s where Cloudflare R2 gets interesting:
S3‑compatible object storage tightly integrated with Cloudflare’s global edge network.
Zero egress fees for data transfer to the internet—no “first X GB free, then $0.09/GB” nonsense.
Pricing:
Standard storage: $0.015/GB‑month.
Free tier: 10 GB storage, 1M Class A (writes) and 10M Class B (reads) per month, with free egress.
Compared to B2:
B2 is cheaper per GB (~$0.006 vs R2’s $0.015).
R2 always wins when egress dominates your bill; you never pay per‑GB for serving files out.
R2 has built‑in edge delivery and Workers integration, which is perfect for modern SaaS, media, and AI workloads.
Given I’m already deep into Cloudflare Workers and edge‑style architectures, I’m explicitly looking at Cloudflare R2 as my main “hot content” store going forward, with Backblaze B2 as the colder, cheaper archive tier.
A simple split that makes sense:
Hot data, user‑facing assets, high read volume → R2.
Cold backups, long‑term archives, datasets that are rarely read → B2.
That combination keeps egress math simple and my M365 dev tenant out of the storage business entirely.
4. Free / cheap sync storage for personal files
For everyday stuff (documents, photos, random zips), consumer cloud storage is still fine—as long as you don’t try to cram hundreds of gigabytes of infra data into it.
Permanent free tiers:
Google Drive: 15 GB free.
MEGA: ~20 GB free.
pCloud/Icedrive: ~10 GB free each.
Paid but cheap:
Google One: ~100 GB for $1.99/month, 200 GB for $2.99, 2 TB for $9.99/month.
OneDrive via Microsoft 365 Personal/Family: 1 TB per user effectively bundled with Office apps.
I’m happy to keep “human” files in Google/OneDrive and stop fighting the fact that infra‑scale storage belongs in object stores like B2/R2 instead.
How I’d redesign your setup from scratch
If you’re stuck where I was—dev tenant capped, uploads failing, future expiry looming—here’s a clean architecture that keeps you out of trouble:
Spin up a small paid M365 tenant for identity, collaboration, and app integration (Business Basic/Standard).
Move all “backup and dataset” storage to Backblaze B2:
Use rclone for regular syncs and backups.
Treat B2 as your archive layer, not something end users hit directly.
Adopt Cloudflare R2 for hot content and assets you serve to users, agents, and dashboards:
S3‑compatible API, free egress, and tight Workers integration.
Use consumer cloud (Google Drive/OneDrive) for your personal documents and photos, not infra data.
This way, when your current M365 dev tenant actually expires or gets deleted, you lose a lab—not your backups, test data, or long‑running experiments.
And as someone already living in the Cloudflare/M365/rclone world, I’m comfortable saying: Backblaze B2 + Cloudflare R2 is where I’m going next, with M365 as just one of the clients in that ecosystem instead of the place I hope will never run out of space
The banner said the trial was ending, storage stopped at around 300 GB, and new uploads simply failed.
If you’re using your dev tenant as a poor man’s lab + file dump, this is the moment it bites you. I’ll walk through what’s going on, how I’m thinking about storage now, and why I’m looking at Backblaze B2 plus Cloudflare R2 as my go‑to combo moving forward.
When your “free” M365 dev tenant suddenly isn’t
The Reddit thread “M365 Developer Tenant – Your trial will end on 2 Aug 2026” isn’t theoretical—it matches exactly what I saw: a trial‑style banner and a hard stop on storage growth.
Historically, the Microsoft 365 Developer Program gave you an E5 dev tenant that auto‑renewed every 90 days as long as you showed developer activity; that has quietly become more restrictive.
Multiple posts and docs now confirm that:
Free E5 dev tenants for “anyone” have been discontinued or heavily limited; they’re mainly available via Visual Studio subscriptions or specific partner programs.
Some older Office 365 E3 Developer subscriptions are scheduled for termination (for example, in September 2026), forcing people to move to other SKUs.
When a dev subscription expires or is marked inactive, your tenant goes through the usual Expired → Disabled → Deleted lifecycle, with data eventually being purged and unrecoverable.
In short: my dev tenant hitting a storage cap and waving an end date isn’t a random glitch—it’s part of Microsoft tightening the screws on “free” dev environments.
The real problem: you treated a dev tenant like a storage bucket
If you’re anything like me, you probably used your dev tenant for way more than “sample apps”:
Test SharePoint sites packed with documents and media.
Exports of production‑like data for Graph/API testing.
Power Platform experiments with chunky file attachments.
That adds up fast. Once my tenant hit ~300 GB, new uploads started failing and I had no clean path to expand capacity without moving to a paid subscription or a different tenant.
Microsoft’s retention and deletion model is perfectly reasonable for a business tenant, but it’s brutal if you’ve quietly parked backups, lab datasets, and long‑term experiments in a subscription that can disappear or cap out without a smooth upgrade path.
So I stopped thinking “how do I keep this dev tenant alive?” and switched to “how do I decouple storage from M365 entirely?”
Alternatives once your dev tenant hits the wall
You basically have three categories of options:
A proper paid Microsoft 365 tenant for identity, collaboration, and “office stuff.”
Cheap object storage for backups, exports, and datasets.
Friendly sync storage for personal files and day‑to‑day use.
Here’s how I’m piecing those together.
1. A small paid M365 tenant for long‑term lab work
The most boring but sensible move is to create a Business Basic/Standard/Premium tenant and intentionally treat it as your permanent lab.
You get:
Stable licensing and predictable retention rules, with clear stages (Expired → Disabled → Deleted) instead of dev‑benefit magic.
A place to host Entra ID, Teams, SharePoint, Exchange, and whatever identity/collab pieces you actually need for long‑running projects.
I wouldn’t use this tenant as my main bulk storage pool anymore—just as the home for accounts, sites, and apps. Big files live elsewhere.
2. Cheap object storage: Backblaze B2 for bulk data
For raw storage that doesn’t care about “Microsoft 365,” Backblaze B2 is one of the cheapest mainstream options right now.
Key points:
Free tier: first 10 GB is free.
Price: around $0.006/GB‑month (≈ $6/TB‑month), with no minimum retention and S3‑compatible APIs.
Egress: free up to roughly three times your stored data via Bandwidth Alliance partners (like Cloudflare); beyond that, about $0.01/GB, still much cheaper than typical S3 rates.
Concrete numbers:
100 GB of backups ≈ $0.60/month.
1 TB ≈ $6/month.
For backing up:
M365 tenant exports (SharePoint/OneDrive PSTs, site templates, etc.).
Database dumps, application artifacts, logs.
AI/ML training datasets and model artifacts.
B2 gives me a cheap, durable bucket that doesn’t care whether my dev tenant lives or dies.
rclone support and real‑world speed
The nice bit: rclone has first‑class support for Backblaze B2. There’s an official integration guide from Backblaze and rclone’s own docs include a dedicated b2 backend.
Backblaze recommends:
–fast-list to reduce API calls.
Increasing –transfers well beyond the default 4; 16–32 parallel transfers often saturate home connections.
Tweaking B2‑specific flags like –b2-upload-concurrency for big files.
Reported speeds:
On a 100 Mbit/s link, users see around 70–75 Mbit/s (~8–9 MB/s) uploads with tuned –transfers values.
On a 39/12 Mbps connection, a ~400 GB initial backup finishes in a few days with tuned rclone params and bandwidth limits to keep the network usable.
Rclone 1.64 introduced multi‑threaded improvements that roughly tripled large‑file copy speeds compared to 1.63 in Backblaze’s own tests.
Practically: if your uplink is decent and you’re willing to tune rclone, B2 will run near line speed, which makes it a very comfortable landing zone for all the stuff you shouldn’t leave inside M365.
3. Serving content: why I’m looking at Cloudflare R2 moving forward
Backblaze B2 is fantastic for cheap storage‑at‑rest, but a lot of my use cases aren’t just backups—they’re assets served to users, APIs, or edge workloads (think voice assistant responses, generated files, dashboards, etc.).
That’s where Cloudflare R2 gets interesting:
S3‑compatible object storage tightly integrated with Cloudflare’s global edge network.
Zero egress fees for data transfer to the internet—no “first X GB free, then $0.09/GB” nonsense.
Pricing:
Standard storage: $0.015/GB‑month.
Free tier: 10 GB storage, 1M Class A (writes) and 10M Class B (reads) per month, with free egress.
Compared to B2:
B2 is cheaper per GB (~$0.006 vs R2’s $0.015).
R2 always wins when egress dominates your bill; you never pay per‑GB for serving files out.
R2 has built‑in edge delivery and Workers integration, which is perfect for modern SaaS, media, and AI workloads.
Given I’m already deep into Cloudflare Workers and edge‑style architectures, I’m explicitly looking at Cloudflare R2 as my main “hot content” store going forward, with Backblaze B2 as the colder, cheaper archive tier.
A simple split that makes sense:
Hot data, user‑facing assets, high read volume → R2.
Cold backups, long‑term archives, datasets that are rarely read → B2.
That combination keeps egress math simple and my M365 dev tenant out of the storage business entirely.
4. Free / cheap sync storage for personal files
For everyday stuff (documents, photos, random zips), consumer cloud storage is still fine—as long as you don’t try to cram hundreds of gigabytes of infra data into it.
Permanent free tiers:
Google Drive: 15 GB free.
MEGA: ~20 GB free.
pCloud/Icedrive: ~10 GB free each.
Paid but cheap:
Google One: ~100 GB for $1.99/month, 200 GB for $2.99, 2 TB for $9.99/month.
OneDrive via Microsoft 365 Personal/Family: 1 TB per user effectively bundled with Office apps.
I’m happy to keep “human” files in Google/OneDrive and stop fighting the fact that infra‑scale storage belongs in object stores like B2/R2 instead.
How I’d redesign your setup from scratch
If you’re stuck where I was—dev tenant capped, uploads failing, future expiry looming—here’s a clean architecture that keeps you out of trouble:
Spin up a small paid M365 tenant for identity, collaboration, and app integration (Business Basic/Standard).
Move all “backup and dataset” storage to Backblaze B2:
Use rclone for regular syncs and backups.
Treat B2 as your archive layer, not something end users hit directly.
Adopt Cloudflare R2 for hot content and assets you serve to users, agents, and dashboards:
S3‑compatible API, free egress, and tight Workers integration.
Use consumer cloud (Google Drive/OneDrive) for your personal documents and photos, not infra data.
This way, when your current M365 dev tenant actually expires or gets deleted, you lose a lab—not your backups, test data, or long‑running experiments.
And as someone already living in the Cloudflare/M365/rclone world, I’m comfortable saying: Backblaze B2 + Cloudflare R2 is where I’m going next, with M365 as just one of the clients in that ecosystem instead of the place I hope will never run out of space