Versioning is killing our storage - is this a normal behaviour?

[StephanGee]

Hi everyone,

we recently had to buy more storage (hands if someone else also had too).

We knew that we have many mp4s and stuff on our sites.

We then used a program to analyze the storage usage and it seems that versioning is our problem.

We analyzed our TOP30 sites - and as you can see.

The PPTX is 650GBs in size but with versioning it is 6TB

Also our top file (many co authors) is 80MB in size but with versioning it is 26.5 GB.

I thought that only a delta is saved (or was this just in SP2013 with shredded storage?)

Can anyone confirm that this is normal and what we can do? (Not killing versioning ;) )

Best regards

Stephan

[#2]

Hi,
What you are seeing is correct. To mitigate this, what you can do is reduce the number of versions per document library

[#3]

@StephanGee 

This is standard behaviour. You can purchase additional storage at €2.04‎ ‎gigabyte‎/year. This may be a short term solution because you will aggregate more and more versions that cost money. You will need to implement measures to control the growth and storage consumption. 

Possible ways forward:
1. As Juan Carlos suggested reduce the number of versions.
2. Use the OOTB reporting to find storage "hotspots" and then delete all versions.
3. Use tools to find hotspots (and selectively purge major/minor versions) example.
4. Use PowerShell scripts to find storage hotspots and purge obsolete versions.

Paul | SLIM Applications

[#4]

Two. Very frustrating. I have some bad actor pptx as well but no where near 6TB wowzers! It really gets to be a headache when you utilize preservation policies and can’t remove the versions lol. Them not respecting or utilizing shredded storage online is rather rediculous especially with the whole auto save functionality ballooning the number of versions.

They did increase storage for this on our tenants but I don’t feel it’s a good solution. One can hope we get shredded storage for SPO but I fear the only work around is what others posted and with retention your just stuck :flushed_face:

[#5]

Thanks for your answers. I hoped for another answer but .. ;)

We already bought some TBs - so i will have a look into scripting. To go over inactive sites and then set it to 5 versions or something like that.

[#6]

Hello@StephanGee 

Have you used any commercial apps or created a script to get the storage space used by the version file?

I would be very grateful if you could tell me the name of this applications :)

I tried with Pnp powershell to get this list but without success so far.

Best Regards

[#7]

@FanouXYZ 
Some of the document management tools listed at Collab365 provide functionality to find storage hot spots and then delete obsolete versions. See here.

[#8]

@Juan Carlos González Martín 

This is not a good workaround. Consider one library with a 2KB file and a 100MB file. We would be happy to have 100 versions of the 2KB file, but we wouldn't want the same for the 100MB file. 
Also from an end-user perspective, it doesn't make sense and it confusing to user to have two separate Teams sites where one has large files and another has small files. What a terrible experience. Good luck trying to explain and communicate the above to everyone in the company.