I've been using SharePoint for about 15 years, and while it's generally user-friendly, I've encountered some frustrating quirks, particularly with file storage and collaboration. We have numerous sites for different clients, and we often work collaboratively on large PowerPoint presentations, with file sizes ranging from 500MB to 1GB due to embedded videos. We set our version history to keep 100 versions at most, but this leads to significant storage issues since automatic cleanup only removes versions older than 30 days. This is especially problematic when a team is heavily collaborating and quickly hits that version limit. I've tried relying on external sources for videos, but it hasn't worked out smoothly. I'm curious what methods others are using to manage versioning—like PowerShell scripts, third-party tools, or even removing versioning entirely. Does anyone have advice or tricks to share?
7 Answers
SharePoint storage can get pricey once you exceed the included limits. We're paying around $100k a year just for our storage! It's definitely something to keep in mind while managing your files.
Have you thought about editing the PowerPoints in OneDrive and just posting the final versions back in SharePoint? The automatic retention policies might be working better than you think. It's possible to link videos from the same SharePoint site instead of embedding them, making things tidier. Just a thought, maybe you only need to keep the main copies shared from OneDrive for collaborators.
We keep pretty strict storage quotas and encourage staff to think about what they’re putting in SharePoint. It’s not their fault that SharePoint creates tons of versions, but we make sure they’re archiving things properly. I have a PowerShell script that deletes older versions while keeping the latest for each day—this helps with storage management significantly. Plus, we alert IT admins when sites are nearing quota limits, which keeps everything in check.
One idea could be to link video files from a local drive instead of embedding them. Just a heads up though, this can get tricky with collaboration since PowerPoint requires absolute paths. You could also think about compressing the videos or using them from a local drive when they’re longer since that might help with performance.
I don’t have a perfect solution, but I read that turning off versioning can cause problems with collaboration. It seems like using PowerShell to clean up older versions might be the best route, and some folks use offline solutions for backups. We personally use Synology Active Backup for Office 365, which keeps all versions forever since storage isn’t an issue for us.
Microsoft recently rolled out automatic version trimming for audio and video files. This could help a lot with managing your version storage issues! You might find it useful to check a couple of blogs for scripts that can automate cleanup—there’s one that’s particularly handy for granular control of version history.
With PowerShell, you can actually set the default versioning to something lower than 100. We set ours to 30 versions and saved around 2TB just by adjusting this limit!
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