Sharepoint storage size over twice as big as the actual storage size

Copper Contributor

Our main Sharepoint site for saving documents was growing very large, to the point where we actually exceeded the 2.5 terabytes we had in our plan. I archived some big files onto a NAS (about 350GB total) so that gave me some room to move forward.

 

Still, the site was a little over 2 terabyte so I decided to download the entire site onto a local harddrive, and there the total was just 900 gigabytes. Then I assumed it had to do with Sharepoint versioning so I looked into that and saw that SP saved up to 500 primary (?) versions. Not sure if that's default or a setting done by my predecessor but I toned it down to 100 versions. That was last week and I still don't see any shrinkage in storage used.

 

I'm a bit stumped right now. I want decrease our storage used by archiving anyway, but it just kind of feel that something's off with the way Sharepoint shows storage metrics. I'd love to hear some tips or tricks from other users that have run into this before. I also emptied the site's trashcan multiple times.

 

Thanks!

3 Replies

@Guido1983 

 

If you don't need all the version (even 100 versions) for larger files then you could try to delete older version of the files using some PowerShell script:

 

https://www.sharepointdiary.com/2018/05/sharepoint-online-delete-version-history-using-pnp-powershel... 

 


Hope it will helpful to you and if so then Please mark my response as Best Response & Like to help others in this community

@Guido1983 

There are potentially multiple causes.

The main one is the presence of document versions. This may result in 100's of versions consuming your storage quota. To reduce this contribution limit the number of versions (setting per library) or use scripts (as @kalpeshvaghela suggested) or tools that can report on version hot spots (link) and purge versions.

Also clear the primary and secondary recycle bin because they also count towards your storage quota consumed. If you do not empty the bins they will count towards your quota consumed for 93 days.

SharePoint property promotion will also increase your storage consumption. By adding additional metadata to files the files sizes increases by a small amount (5-10 kB) each. If you have 1 M small emails these kind of effects becoome noticable though. This only affects Office files, msg emails and tiff files. File types like jpg, pdf, ... are not changed and keep their original size.

Thank you both for your responses! It's very much appreciated. Turns out my account wasn't able to see the secondary bin, so that has been resolved now and I deleted a couple of pages of RAW photography files. I'm pretty sure that will be noticeable :) Also, my colleague is working with @kalpeshvaghela 's script suggestions. I will update when we see improvements!