Are you overpaying for additional SharePoint Storage?

It isn't uncommon to hit your SharePoint storage capacity (1TB plus 10GB per licensed user). Once you go over, you need to start paying - and it's possible one of the most expensive cloud storage costs around.

The alternative is a clean up. Archiving, deleting, emptying recycle bins etc. But lets look at what usually causes the blow out.

Versioning!!

By default SharePoint retains the last 500 versions of a file - which is great if you want to go back and see the changes over time. But - keeping the math simple, a 1GB file with 500 versions is actually a 500GB file - that's half your capacity gone. Ok - not many 1GB files, so lets look at some more real data. Even the small files add up.

Check out this data. 501 versions of a 67MB file - 31.83GB. These 6 files alone are 148GB - 10% of the total SharePoint capacity. That's only 6 files of nearly 250,000 files in this 1 library in 1 site.

Ok, so how do you resolve it?

First off, you need to change the library settings to keep a lower retention on versions. The lowest you can go (without 3rd party management) is 100. But changing the versions doesn't retrospectively clean up the 400 additional versions. This clean up is called trimming.

With our Managed 365 services, we can keep your version history trimmed and ensure all new libraries created adhere to a lower version retention - even below the SharePoint lowest limit of 100 versions. So, we can set a policy to ensure all libraries have a version limit of 20 and then clean up all versions from up to 500 to 20.

With this current example - see below, we've managed to trim a huge amount of data (1.64TB) and the cost savings alone cover the cost of our Managed 365 services.

As you can see you can also trim versions based on age - that would have had even more impact - but we feel that keeping some history for documents is worthwhile.