Forum Discussion
Sharepoint Online storage - metadata updates
Hi,
We are building a content management solution in SharePoint Online to replace a legacy application. As part of this, we migrated around 1.5 TB of files (1.2 million) using SharePoint Migration tool from disk to SharePoint Online document library. We also customized the SharePoint document library and added additional custom columns. We used ShareGate to update the custom metadata columns. Since this was the testing phase we had multiple iterations of metadata updates until we got it right. We had around 7 iterations and we noticed that every update of the metadata was a new version. Note, we only updated the metadata and not the file itself. The file remained unchanged.
But we realized that the storage in SharePoint Online went up to 11 TB i.e. 1.5 TB multiplied by 7. This was truly unexpected for us as we did not realize that just updating metadata creates a copy of the file (even though the file is unchanged).
We are stuck as the expectation of the new SharePoint application is that end users would update metadata multiple times as part of the business flow. We need to keep a history of the changes to the metadata but if the cost is multifold increase in storage then we have hit a roadblock.
Any solutions?
This is a known problem with metadata changes and even simple actions as renaming a document results in a new document version.
There are Apps that allow users to change metadata values without adding additional versions. See example.
You also need to look into solutions to purge obsolete document versions to keep your costs under control.
Lastly, check if you use retention labels because that will prevent you from purging older versions.Paul_HK_de_Jong Thanks, but we need versioning of the metadata. That is important to our solution. But, we do not want every version of metadata changes to add additional storage. Some of our files are 500MB plus and we don't want a storage overrun when metadata is updated by end users. Our solution requires that every metadata change has to be captured from the beginning of time and we aren't allowed to purge these version.
