Versioning settings not applied

Question

I got a notification that my SharePoint usage is full. Upon further investigation, we realized that SharePoint is creating too many versions of documents which is eating up space. I have seen 100MB files have 500 versions eating up around 50GB of space. As a temporary step, deleted the versions for some files manually. Later, I updated the versioning settings to delete all versions older than 30 days and limit the number of versions to 100.

This has been a month ago. However, even today, I have 500 versions for many files as old as 3-4 years. Is there a fix for this?

Answer 1

Dear Bhargava Grandhi

Good day! Thank you for posting to Microsoft Community. I am happy to help you

According to our investigation, you can use the below PowerShell command to achieve your requirement.before running the command, please change <SharePoint/site/URL> to your actual domain name.

in the command specify the how many versions do you want to keep.

You first need PowerShell 7 with pnp module installed.

Please note you need to use PowerShell 7 with PNP module connected to SPO services

#Config Parameters
$SiteURL = "https://yourdomain.sharepoint.com/sites/Microsoft"
$VersionsToKeep = 5

Try { 
    #Connect to PnP Online
    Connect-PnPOnline -Url $SiteURL -Interactive
 
    #Get the Context
    $Ctx= Get-PnPContext
 
    #Exclude certain libraries
    $ExcludedLists = @("Form Templates", "Preservation Hold Library","Site Assets", "Pages", "Site Pages", "Images",
                            "Site Collection Documents", "Site Collection Images","Style Library")
 
    #Get All document libraries
    $DocumentLibraries = Get-PnPList | Where-Object {$_.BaseType -eq "DocumentLibrary" -and $_.Title -notin $ExcludedLists -and $_.Hidden -eq $false}
 
    #Iterate through each document library
    ForEach($Library in $DocumentLibraries)
    {
        Write-host "Processing Document Library:"$Library.Title -f Magenta
 
        #Get All Items from the List - Exclude 'Folder' List Items
        $ListItems = Get-PnPListItem -List $Library -PageSize 2000 | Where {$_.FileSystemObjectType -eq "File"}
 
        #Loop through each file
        ForEach ($Item in $ListItems)
        {
            #Get File Versions
            $File = $Item.File
            $Versions = $File.Versions
            $Ctx.Load($File)
            $Ctx.Load($Versions)
            $Ctx.ExecuteQuery()
  
            Write-host -f Yellow "`tScanning File:"$File.Name
            $VersionsCount = $Versions.Count
            $VersionsToDelete = $VersionsCount - $VersionsToKeep
            If($VersionsToDelete -gt 0)
            {
                write-host -f Cyan "`t Total Number of Versions of the File:" $VersionsCount
                $VersionCounter= 0
                #Delete versions
                For($i=0; $i -lt $VersionsToDelete; $i++)
                {
                    If($Versions[$VersionCounter].IsCurrentVersion)
                    {
                       $VersionCounter++
                       Write-host -f Magenta "`t`t Retaining Current Major Version:"$Versions[$VersionCounter].VersionLabel
                       Continue
                    }
                    Write-host -f Cyan "`t Deleting Version:" $Versions[$VersionCounter].VersionLabel
                    $Versions[$VersionCounter].DeleteObject()
                }
                $Ctx.ExecuteQuery()
                Write-Host -f Green "`t Version History is cleaned for the File:"$File.Name
            }
        }
    }
}
Catch {
    write-host -f Red "Error Cleaning up Version History!" $_.Exception.Message
}

Thank you for your time and patience, we hope you have a great day!

Sincerely

Community Moderator | Sophia