Best Practices to Manage SharePoint Site size

[Bhavpreet Bains]

Hello,

I feels like SharePoint site size keep on growing even with the most relevant content. I have noticed a file which has grown up to 8 GB with all versions. The most recent version is a little over 100 MB and there are 80 versions in total. It's just one file. There are multiple files like that, that have grown to a tremendous sizes increasing the site size drastically. The site I am currently looking at is almost 2 TB now.

I don't think just increasing the site storage is the correct way of managing them. So, I am wondering what could be the best practices to manage the site sizes.

Thank you.

Bhavpreet Bains

[#2]

@Bhavpreet Bains 

Managing document versions is often not take care of and this may result in a significant increase in storage consumed.

You have several options:
a. Do nothing and accept the quota consumed by the document versions.
b. Use PowerShell to report on documents with many versions and then run a separate script to delete the document versions. e.g. https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/office/Delete-all-previous-file-fd1ba18a
c. Use 3rd party tools. e.g. there are browser-based tools (with trial licenses) that allow you to purge all document versions or only keep the last N document versions. e.g. SLIM Companion Explorer.

Paul

[#3]

Hi @Bhavpreet Bains 

Are your troublesome files a particular filetype or is it all files that are showing this growth? 

Andy

[#4]

Thank you Paul for reply and providing the options.
a. Doing nothing and ignoring, I don't think it's a good option as eventually it's going eat up all the space in the tenant.
b. Running a Powershell Job won't be feasible, as running it for 2 TB site may take a long time complete, let alone running it on multiple sites. Also, with this, the site will always need an admin account to access the content.
c. I think the third party tools will also pose similar issues as powershell solution. However, I will still check them out.

Are there in general best practices that can be applied to site itself on creation to avoid running into some of these issues?

Thank you.

[#5]

The troublesome files can be any frequently updated files like word, powerpoint or excel depending who uses what. Each time a file gets edited it creates a brand new version with the new file size. E.g. File A which is currently 1 MB was updated with .1MB size increase. So, the new version size is 1.1MB and overall file size increases to 2.1 MB considering the size of both versions.