Also storage is (relatively) cheap and document management and retention tools can be expensive, as is user training.
Tiered storage is pretty effective at handling large volumes of files, so thought it might look like 83TB is a lot, Microsoft is able to manage that for a few cents a terabyte.
I am struggling to keep my personal iCloud data to below 200Gb so Squadrons could easily exceed that.
But that’s 83 TB for emails.
My personal Gmail account goes back to 2009. I delete nothing. There’s 90,000 emails in there. It’s only 10GB!
My total Google drive usage is up to about 200GB though, but that’s mostly photo and video backups from my phone.
And then, well, there’s this mess:
I’ve got the best part of 6TB of data stored on my PC 
Thought I would check out my storage, for anyone else interested without Outlook Online > File > Account Info > Storage
You can use the Manage option to clear out emails over varying timelines
I’ve just emptied my Deleted Items over 12 months and this has reduced the message count from 9898 > 7298 (26% Reduction) and a 30% reduction in size.
Oddly 83TB seems to be an average figure for 10,000 exchange users (there’s some case studies with that exact figure). And it works out at 8.3GB each which is not an awful lot.
I certainly get a lot of emails sent to all users that I don’t need, then there are the various spam / commercial mails that bung up role accounts, and don’t sent allow you to unsubscribe. So it’s not a dreadful figure.
Though I had assumed deleted items would actually be deleted, not just hang around for ever!
FFIW i had to do this regularly with an RBL account. I was easily “holding” ~400-500 emails each event, of which there were 2 a year - with lots of attachments along the way (invite letters, joining instructions, and thank you for supporting our event letters)
i would regularly have to do the same process every 6 months in an attempt to keep the account ~50% - after an event it would always pop up to 70-75%. The Branch Secretary had it worse, and often reached 100% which stopped all emails coming in and out.
This is even more powerful than I thought, it clearly hadn’t finished before, now at 1150 items and 147.68 MB.
88% reduction in items + 92% reduction in storage, for that deleted items folder alone
Obviously won’t be this powerful again, as the personal mailbox dates back to 2021, imagine the impact if every Role Account did that though, especially the multi user accounts.
I dread to think what is in our Squadron general account!
Exchange allows admins to set a different retention policy for each folder. I don’t think we have any over 3 years and deleted items is either 1 week or 1 month.
In my previous aviation company, the standard, across the board, was 3 months of storage for old emails.
If you didn’t proactively move an important email to a “saved” folder, then touch, gone after 3 months.
I would shuffle about 80% of my emails to this folder.
About every 2 - 3 months, I would get an enquiry from our fleet manager or engineering team - Hey Mike, do you remember XXXX, the topic has come up before - what was the answer? Yep, I can find that. 
At some early stage in the system (as before the company email was set up properly, we used private email addresses), due to concerns about policy emails disappearing, I had set up a rule to auto-forward inbox emails to a gmail account - forgot all about it.
Jump forward about 10 yrs, got a snottogram from the primary IT department (in USA) telling me that I had set up an unapproved mail rule & that I’d better delete of it soonest!
I asked them how? Due to migration from one system to another, they didn’t know!! Got there in the end but it took ages.
This is why I don’t delete anything!
Parts of the internet seem to be breaking, both Monzo and Reddit are currently not functioning.
Any other issues?
Looking at the problem reports, monzo was slightly before reddit, not at the same time? So possibly just bad timing? Hopefully at least!
i always consult https://downdetector.co.uk/ whenever i have such predictions
seems you are right looking at the front page currently
All seems to be working again now at least, so nothing too serious after all.
After the fiasco that was Windows 10 EOL, I didn’t fancy throwing away our (the family’s) PCs and laptops, so we’ve migrated to Linux Mint.
That worked smoothly and I’m now getting into understanding and using Linux more. So far, VMs, Docker, cron and scripts.
It’s been so refreshing to have an OS and software that isn’t closed off, doing who knows what with our data or pushing adverts.
I’ve been using Ubuntu (currently have 22.04 LTS) for several years now.
There’s nothing I miss from Windows at this point; certainly not the AI or ads!
I’ve been using Fedora almost entirely for a while now, I (frustratingly) just have to keep a Windows partition for the odd game with anti cheat that insists on it.
Equally, with uni taking more and more of my spare time I’ve had less and less for that, so I don’t think it’ll be long before I can ditch it entirely.
I just like the freedom personally, the customisation to do whatever the hell I want is fantastic. Not having Copilot forcing it’s way into places it has no business being isn’t bad either…
