How do you handle SharePoint storage creep?

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rubber_galaxy@reddit

We had a huge issue with this for one of our clients and it was due to previous versions not being turned on properly - it was storing unlimited versions so we had to change the rules so that it used the default Microsoft algorithm to do this. Might be worth a quick look to see if that is the offence.

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Lukage@reddit

I remember a post a year or two ago here that had someone talk about how they got some sort of big bonus or something for saving the company 6-figures simply by making this adjustment and clearing 100's of TBs of previous versions.

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bot403@reddit

Microsoft hates this one weird trick which costs them 6 figures in revenue.

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archiekane@reddit

So do the shareholders.

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Zedilt@reddit

Won't somebody think of my pension fund.

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itslevis@reddit

"top ten tricks Microsoft doesn't want you to know, the last one will blow your mind"

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techierealtor@reddit

Had one I was doing. Previous versions of a massive file were like 90% of one Sharepoint site because it was set to unlimited and was hundreds of versions.

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Kardinal@reddit

What method did you use to determine the right granularity and history to use for those SharePoint libraries when it comes to versioning?

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DominusDraco@reddit

Change the site versioning to Automatic. Instead of keeping all versions of a file up to a limit, it starts pruning hourly, daily and weekly versions over time.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/plan-version-storage#understand-version-storage-under-automatic-limits

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Morkai@reddit

Someone tell me when you figure it out.

We are currently oversubscribed by about 800GB.

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Firenyth@reddit

Check your versioning settings.

I'm very fond of setting automatic versioning, its dynamic based on file activity and age. have saved many TB for clients with this.

Once you change your versioning settings you can manually kick off a job to run the clean up

New-SPOListFileVersionBatchDeleteJob -Site [sharepoint url] - List [document library] -TrimUseListPolicy

can monitor it with Get-SPOListFileVersionBatchDeleteJobProgress -Site [sharepoint url] - list [document library]

I found these link very helpful
Plan version storage for document libraries - SharePoint in Microsoft 365 | Microsoft Learn
New-SPOListFileVersionBatchDeleteJob (Microsoft.Online.SharePoint.PowerShell) | Microsoft Learn
Trim existing versions on site, library, or OneDrive - SharePoint in Microsoft 365 | Microsoft Learn

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VonVokk@reddit

Version history trimming! Saved 2.8TB across our main sites. Be sure to run what if scripts to get an understanding of what the impact will be. We opted for 180 day retention.

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jameseatsworld@reddit

We have automated backups via avepoint.

We cap previous versions in SharePoint online to 5 (PowerShell script allows lower limits than you can set via webUI).

Avepoint contains the versions that are auto-deleted.

When we need to free up space we purge from second stage recycle bin in each site, which contains auto-deleted versions > 30 days.

The overall default SharePoint storage limits are still disappointingly low compared to competitors.

SharePoint Diary (google) has scripts for doing broad storage metric reports. AI is your friend for this too.

It's always useful to run a report periodically for large files - marketing loves to save +300GB uncompressed mp4s, users make copies of sams files across different libraries.

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OneSeaworthiness7768@reddit

third-party tools

This is the reason OP is making this post, so another account controlled by them can drop their tool in the comments.

I’m tired, boss. Reddit is cooked.

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Kardinal@reddit

Well, so far there's only one mention of a third-party tool. And that's from an account with 93,000 karma. While it's not impossible that it's a bot or a sock puppet, that doesn't seem very likely.

But it's only a few hours. We'll give it sometime and see if you are right.

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OneSeaworthiness7768@reddit

It doesn’t always come right away. As long as it’s there later for the search engines to find.

And that's from an account with 93,000 karma and is four years old with 800+ posts.

That part definitely doesn’t always matter when SEO companies are explicitly advertising that they use established high-karma accounts for their services.

Sometimes these posts are just for the sake of building up the post history.

Could I be wrong in this case? Sure. But this post sounds like every other one that engages in that behavior, so I remain skeptical. And I think people should know what to look for because those organic marketing posts are popping up daily.

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Laearo@reddit

Jesus christ literally every single post now has 'OP is AI' commented on it - sometimes people just have questions.

Funnily enough, people DO use 3rd party solutions for problems they are facing, and sometimes you need to ask people to find new ones.

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OneSeaworthiness7768@reddit

My post didn’t mention AI. This is a marketing/SEO problem. Some of the tools being marketed are AI related, some aren’t. But they are absolutely being astroturfed here. If you don’t see it, you’re not paying attention. Look at the description of what this company does. There are dozens are other services like that. Reddit, and especially technology related subreddits, are being hit with these types of ‘organic’ marketing posts multiple times a day.

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Laearo@reddit

You're right, sorry - it's either AI or 'theyre just trying to sell something'

And yes I know it is happening, but it's to the point where every single post I see here is being accused of one of those.

I should probably just go back to spiceworks more often and leave here tbh.

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OneSeaworthiness7768@reddit

I’ve yet to really see anyone being accused who didn’t legitimately look like they’re doing what they’re being accused of. It’s really happening that frequently. I’m sure the mods could attest to how many posts they’ve been removing.

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Laearo@reddit

As I said, not denying there are a lot of them, but this post has had one 3rd party tool mentioned (not even linked in the comment like they usually are).

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OneSeaworthiness7768@reddit

They usually don’t do actual links to avoid getting banned. They’ll just mention the name for seo purposes.

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bigolpenguinpapa@reddit

One thing that helped us a ton was limiting document versioning. We implemented that, and after cleaning up the excess versions, our storage opened way up.

We use SharePoint for file storage, which I'm not a huge fan of, and I've been tasked with working on automation to archive inactive files and clean up space. Turned out to be complicated due to how SharePoint marks a file's last activity date (which is not necessarily the time a file was last viewed), and is a major pain. My whole solution is really contrived, but works. I'm sure some kind of integration exists out there, but the executives aren't paying for that. 😉

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Kardinal@reddit

What method did you use to determine the right granularity and history to use for those SharePoint libraries when it comes to versioning?

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roccagold@reddit

We had a similar issue and ended up writing a PowerShell script that runs weekly to generate a report of the largest folders and users, then sends it to the relevant team leads. It's not fully automated archiving, but it gives them the data they need to make informed decisions, and we're currently trialing with risotto to automate the cleanup based on those reports.

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LeakyAssFire@reddit

We implemented SysKit and it has been a God send for this type of crap. We tackled versioning first as others have stated, then expired links, former employees, abandoned sites. Then we moved onto abandoned Teams\Teams without owners and retired a bunch more after that.

There's more the SysKit, but the SharePoint stuff has already been worth it.

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DrMacintosh01@reddit

We have so little data, and IT is my side job at the company I work for. I like making a day out of archiving. I think it’s fun.

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Affectionate-Cat-975@reddit

Given that the business doesn't want to manage it's data, we just add storage space and log it weekly

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TheSchwartz15@reddit

as others have said, sharepoint versioning was the key to fix this issue for us. We have people working with creative files (videos, adobe indesign, etc) and the size of those files and the versioning was using so much storage. We turned on the automatic versioning and gained back 20% of our sharepoint storage and its been able to maintain that same level since, confirming that versioning was really the problem. Version history limits for document library and OneDrive overview - SharePoint in Microsoft 365 | Microsoft Learn

the thing that is sometimes lost with implementing this feature for existing environments is by default its a go-forward setting only applying to new sites and new document libraries. You have run powershell against each existing site to enableautoexpirationversiontrim. then a couple days later, you have to kick off a batch job to execute that expiration against the site.

Set-SPOSite -Identity $Site.Url -EnableAutoExpirationVersionTrim $true -ApplyToExistingDocumentLibraries -confirm:$false
New-SPOSiteFileVersionBatchDeleteJob -Identity $Site.Url -Automatic -Confirm:$false

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StarSlayerX@reddit

We had a similar issue of reducing Sharepoint storage because we were paying 100TB of Sharepoint storage from Microsoft.

1) Limited versioning of documents
2) Data Retention policy

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Chaucer85@reddit

Copilot licensing comes with the Sharepoint Advanced Management (SAM) suite, which can help with a lot of the problems you mention. depends on the size of your org if the cost-benefit is there.