How do you reduce SharePoint storage use?

Hi Cliff,

I appreciate the response, but I am our SharePoint site administrator and an engineer, and even I'm quite overwhelmed by your instructions. I certainly didn't think I'd need PnP commands to delete files and change key settings which determine how much storage we need.

In plain English, our organization doesn't need more than ~1TB of storage, but to ensure we don't exceed this limit we're going to cull old files regularly and turn off and version history settings which are causing our storage use to blow out.

So, put simply:

1. Where do I find the second-level recycle bin in SharePoint?
2. How can I turn off version history via a UI without code?

Thanks in advance.

Michael.

P.S. I think a lot of small businesses using SharePoint will expect this to be simple and easy to do, as storage is expensive and most will want to limit usage rather than paying to store old files and versions they don't need.

Dear Michael,

Thanks for your updates and kindness.

I'm glad to hear that the information above helps you.

Welcome to post a new thread on our forum at your convenience if you encounter any issues in your environment.

Have a nice day!

Sincerely

Cliff | Microsoft Community Moderator

Thanks for your detailed and helpful response Cliff, it's much appreciated.

The link to the second stage recycle bin was the key to us freeing up over 300GB of storage.

I will look into the SharePoint Online PnP commands you've provided.

Thanks again.

Michael

Dear Michael,

Welcome to the forum here.

From the information, it seems that you set the site storage limit in your environment. As the site storage is calculated based on the license you bought mentioned in SharePoint limits - Service Descriptions | Microsoft Learn, you may check whether you need to buy extra storage at your side. If no and if you are the administrator, you can adjust the site storage via the steps in Manage site storage limits in SharePoint in Microsoft 365 - SharePoint in Microsoft 365 | Microsoft Learn to move forward.

About the issue that you can't reduce the site storage, I'd like you to first check whether you have deleted the files from the sites from the first-level recycle bin and the second-level recycle bin. Some files may be deleted with fail because of some reasons such as there are some label policies set on the site library.

Generally, to turn off the version history and bulk-remove files, you can consider using SharePoint Online Management Shell. You may need to let the administrator run them.

For example, if you want to disable the version history on a site library, you can run the SharePoint Online PnP commands in SharePoint Online Management Shell as follows.

Connect-SPOService -Url https://contoso-admin.sharepoint.com -Credential ******@contoso.onmicrosoft.com

Connect-PnPOnline -Url "https://contoso.sharepoint.com/sites/sitename" -Credential (Get-Credential)

$SiteURL="https://contoso.sharepoint.com/sites/sitename"

$ListName = "libraryname"

Set-PnPList -Identity $ListName -EnableVersioning $False

If you want to delete all files in a site library and remove them from the first level recycle bin and the second level recycle bin, you can run the commands as follows.

$SiteURL="https://contoso.sharepoint.com/sites/sitename"

$ListName = "libraryname"

Get-PnPList -Identity $ListName | Get-PnPListItem -PageSize 100 -ScriptBlock {

Param($items) Invoke-PnPQuery } | ForEach-Object { $_.Recycle() | Out-Null

}

While( (Get-PnPRecycleBinItem -RowLimit 500) -ne $null)

{

Get-PnPRecycleBinItem -RowLimit 500 | Clear-PnPRecycleBinItem -Force

}

Thanks for your effort and time!

Sincerely

Cliff | Microsoft Community Moderator