Introduction: What is SharePoint Online Versioning?

SharePoint Online versioning is a cool service that tracks and stores multiple versions of the same file as changes are made over time.

Retaining multiple versions of files means that users get to restore previous versions, providing a safeguard against accidental deletion. Versioning also allow multiple folk to work on the same file at once. Your organisation might also need to keep hold of previous versions of files to meet auditing and compliance needs.

The downside of versioning is that it’s easy to end up with lots of file versions – and consequently use up lots of SharePoint storage space. Consider this:

• SharePoint automatically creates a new version of a document whenever a user clicks ‘Save’.

• If autosave is turned on (which it is by default with your OneDrive, synced libraries and in Office Online applications) SharePoint automatically saves a version of a document every few minutes.

• If multiple people are working on the same document simultaneously, this will also result in new versions for each contributor.

File Types Can Also Govern the Impact of SharePoint versioning

Large video files are a great example of how your SharePoint storage can get massively ‘eaten up’ with versioning.

When you make even a small tweak to a video file – such as adjusting metadata or trimming a getting rid of an ‘erm’ – SharePoint saves the entire file as a new version.

For example, if a 1GB video is updated 10 times, you could end up using 10GB of storage, even if the changes were minor.

Limiting the number of versions SharePoint creates can help address this issue…read on.

How to Limit SharePoint Versioning to Cut Storage Costs

To reduce the number of versions SharePoint saves, you can apply a limit.

By default, SharePoint Online stores the last 500 major versions of a document.   

Switching this up to a figure such as 50 or 100 will help reduce your storage overheads, whilst giving you the ‘safety net’ users need to be able to restore a document to an earlier point in time.

You can reduce this number manually at an organisational level, i.e., across all your SharePoint sites, from the SharePoint Admin Center.

Site owners can also set versioning on a per site basis using the PowerShell command Set-SPOSite. 

They can also update the version settings of a specific Document Library by navigating to Library (or List) settings, selecting More Library settings, and then choosing Versioning settings.

Things to Watch out for When Modifying SharePoint Versions

There’s some things (gotchas) to understand when you start adjusting version numbers:

Any reductions you make to organisation-wide version history limits in the SharePoint Admin Center will not automatically update the limits applied to any existing SharePoint sites – they only apply to new sites you create going forward.

To update existing version settings, you will need to set version limits for each site or set version limits on individual libraries as indicated above.

Another thing to bear in mind is that even if you carry out these steps, the versions of files that ‘extend beyond’ the new limit will not automatically be removed (aka ‘trimmed’) to reflect the new limits.

To do this you will need to carry out some more steps to trim existing versions on a site or library.

You also Need to Understand How Versioning Works with Retention Policies

Yet another important factor is that versioning works hand-in-hand with retention policies.

This means that even if you reduce your version limit to 50 and make the necessary adjustments, any pre-existing versions that extend beyond this limit will still be retained in accordance with your retention policies. Are you with me still?

Additionally, trimming SharePoint versions will not delete files that are still subject to a retention policy.

In other words, your retention policies will ‘trump’ your version settings.

The net outcome is that you may not see a significant storage reduction ‘overnight’ or without some significant effort.

You can read more about versioning and retention policies in this Microsoft article.

Another more effective way to reduce your version storage costs is to use SharePoint file-level archiving that supports file versioning.

This is How SharePoint Version Archiving Works

You also have the option of replacing the original files with a much smaller shortcut (stub) that can be used to retrieve the required item(s) from the archive.

This not only leads to immediate and significant storage space savings, it also delivers the best end user experience.

SharePoint Version Archiving – A Customer Example

An Essential SharePoint archiving customer had a total of 474 TBs of data in SharePoint. Over 200 TBs were identified for archiving due to multi-versioned documents.

By cleaning up and reducing the number of stored versions, they were able to free up storage and improve efficiency practically overnight.

Past versions of files were still available in the archive and could easily be retrieved by end users, however they weren’t taking up precious primary storage space.