Forum Discussion
SharePoint : Your storage is almost full - one approach
We are continuously adding space to SP Online site, because my SharePoint online is constantly running out of space, we have huge libraries with 1000 GB and 10000 Versions.
My Question:
with retention policy in place, therefore versions with retention policy will be deleted old versions and limit 50 versions by the script above. If not, what is the best course of action for my problem?
we have retention policy in place for 7 Years.
looking for best solution for high SharePoint storage Issue.
Hi N51768
I'm not sure what the retention policy will do to your space ? You'll need to ask someone who works with that a lot.
If you've used "Version settings" for your libraries, that should mean that you have a maximum of 60 versions for any file in that library.
I'd suggest you check that first. e.g. a file that has existed for a long time, and is edited regularly might have be on Version 276, and you should only be able to go back 50 versions to version 226 and not further back in time.
If that is true for your files, then the space may be being eaten up by either the retention policy and or the size of the files.
In my environment I found that some files with 100s of versions took up almost no space, but that for most Word and Excel files previous versions were the same size as the file at that version. So for some files that were being edited hundreds of times a day we moved over to SharePoint lists or other solutions. This saved us quite a bit of space.
The other recommendation would be to get your Microsoft Account manager to take a look and help out. If you have that many files and are spending extra on storage they will likely be able to provide some recommendations.
Dorje-McKinnon Did you notice the reduction of space with the versioning? I've been on the on premise side of storage and worked with Microsoft for years.
On prem devices sell you on how much they'll save you in terms of deduplication of data and compression and all those things. So if you had 10 files that were 1 GB each, but they were different versions of each other, you don't necessarily use up 10 GB of space on the device, perhaps with compression and deduplication the 10 files would take up a lot less, maybe not much over 1 GB depending on on different the 10 versions are from each other.
Does Microsoft do the same or are they counting each and every one of these versions? Especially with the major versions.
One temptation we had to reduce our footprint is removal or reduction of version history. But if MS is using tools (they certainly are) to reduce the space on devices, are they passing that on to us or simply counting up every version because the difference in those calculations would make a big difference in my focus.
