Alter Version History retention in SharePoint
Students, faculty, and staff may manually set the number of Versions that a SharePoint site stores for each file. There is one setting that sets the rule for the entire SharePoint Document Library. Users may want to create a dedicated Document Library to hold files with reduced Versioning.
Why would I do this?
If your SharePoint site has large files (2GB or more), such as database files or video files, that are edited frequently, the storage consumed by their Versioning may quickly balloon out to many times the size of the real data. SharePoint stores a copy of the entire file for each version.
Example: You and your team make 40 edits to a 2GB file of the course of the week and so SharePoint stores 40 Versions of the file, allowing you to go back in time in case you would like to restore the file to a previous state. This file is now consuming 80GB (40 x 2GB) of space in your OneDrive.
The consequence of Versioning most files often goes unnoticed: 100 Versions of a 50KB Word document equals 5MB.
Instead of following this guide, you may simply copy your large(s) file to a new location in your SharePoint site and then delete the original file(s). You can then move the file back into the original location. This will quickly remove previous versions but they will come back over time if the file is accessed consistently.
You may change the Version retention settings for each Document Library in your SharePoint site.
You may create a Document Library solely for files that should have different retention settings.
Change the retention setting
You must be an Owner of the SharePoint site. If you would like to apply these custom settings to a Document Library that is dedicated to files with custom Version History retention, please visit this guide first to create a new Document Library: Additional Document Libraries in SharePoint.
Visit s.uconn.edu/sharepoint and click on the desired SharePoint site.
Click on the Document Library you would like to alter.
The default library is named “Documents”.
Note: This library may have been given a custom name by an Owner; it may not be named “Documents”.
Click on the settings wheel in the top right corner.
Click on Library settings and then More library settings.
Click on Versioning settings.
The two relevant settings are “Version time limit” and “Version count limit”
In order to set the count limit, you must change the time limit to “Manual”.Consider the values you wish to set for these two settings:
Take into account the size of the file, the frequency of edits, and the desired recovery duration.
Example: I have a database file that my teams updates a couple times a day, but we really only need a week of backups. I can set the number of days to 7 and set the major versions to 7.
Click OK at the bottom to save your changes.