Sixty completed client projects. Over 1,200 empty folders left behind. Nobody had ever gone back to clean any of it up.
That was the state of the SharePoint tenant at Kestrel Creative, a 55-person branding and design agency, when its operations manager finally sat down to count. Every new client engagement started from a project site template with folders for briefs, concepts, revisions, final assets, and client sign-off. Every closed engagement left that same folder skeleton behind, mostly empty, scattered across dozens of sites that nobody was actively maintaining anymore.
Meet Priya, operations manager at Kestrel Creative. Priya is not a SharePoint specialist. Her job is running the studio: resourcing, timelines, and making sure client deliverables go out the door. SharePoint administration landed on her desk almost by accident, because nobody else on a lean creative team had the bandwidth to own it.
The situation: tidy on the surface, messy underneath
Kestrel's new starters kept commenting that project sites felt cluttered even when a project only had a handful of active files. Search results returned folder after folder with nothing in them. Priya assumed it was a training issue at first. It was not. When she opened a handful of closed project sites directly, she found the same pattern everywhere: two or three folders with real content, and eight or nine completely empty ones sitting alongside them.
Separately, the studio's finance lead had flagged that SharePoint storage had crept up faster than the number of active projects would explain. Priya suspected version history was part of the answer, since design files went through dozens of revision rounds and nobody had ever set a version limit.
What she was dealing with, tenant-wide
- 62 project sites, 41 of them marked internally as closed or archived.
- An estimated 1,200+ empty folders across those closed sites, based on a manual sample.
- No version limit set on any document library; some creative asset files had 80 to 150 saved versions.
- A recycling bin that had accumulated deleted draft files, old logo iterations, and abandoned concept decks for well over a year.
Step 1: Find the empty folders with Explore Master
Priya started with Explore Master, running it across the 41 closed project sites to surface folder structures and flag which ones held zero files. Rather than opening each site by hand, she got back a working list of exactly which folders were empty and where they lived.
The count came in higher than her manual sample suggested: 1,340 empty folders across the closed sites, most of them templated subfolders that had simply never been used on a given engagement.
Step 2: Remove them in bulk with Space Master
With the list in hand, Priya used the Empty Folder Remover inside Space Master to clear the flagged folders across all 41 sites in a single run. She reviewed the list first with two project leads to confirm nothing on it was a placeholder folder still needed for an upcoming phase, then let the job run overnight.
"I expected this to take me a week of clicking through sites one at a time. It took one review call and one overnight run instead."
Step 3: Trim version bloat on active libraries
Empty folders solved the clutter problem. Storage was a separate issue, and version history was the biggest single contributor. Priya used the Version Trimmer, also part of Space Master, to set a 20-version keep policy across every project library, then ran an initial trim on the ten heaviest libraries first.
Design files with 100-plus saved iterations dropped to a clean 20-version history each. Combined across the ten libraries, version storage fell from roughly 96 GB to 19 GB.
Step 4: Clear the stale recycling bin with Recycle Master
Last, Priya turned to Recycle Master to search the recycling bin across all sites. She filtered by deletion date to isolate anything older than 90 days, exported the list to Excel for a quick sanity check with the creative director, and then ran a bulk restore of two files someone flagged as still needed before clearing the rest.
The bin, untouched for over a year, released close to 30 GB once cleared.
What is Empty Folder Removal, exactly?
Empty folder removal is the process of identifying and deleting folders in a document library that contain no files or subfolders with content, typically left over from a template structure that was never fully used. It cleans up navigation and search results without touching any file that a project team might still need.
Results after the first full closeout cleanup pass
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Empty folders across closed sites | ~1,340 | 0 |
| Version history (top 10 libraries) | ~96 GB | ~19 GB |
| Recycling bin storage | ~30 GB (13+ months old) | Under 1 GB |
| Time to complete first pass | Roughly two working days plus overnight jobs | |
| Ongoing cadence adopted | Quarterly closeout cleanup, tied to project archive dates | |
Building it into the studio's workflow
Priya did not want to repeat a two-day manual effort every year. Once the first pass was done, she added a short closeout checklist to the studio's project management process: whenever a project moves to archived status, its site gets queued for the next quarterly cleanup run. The version limit she set stays in place automatically, so new projects do not accumulate the same bloat from a fresh start.
New starters stopped commenting on cluttered project sites within the first month. Search results in closed sites now return only folders that actually hold something, which matters more than it sounds for a studio that regularly reopens old projects to reuse brand assets.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do SharePoint sites accumulate empty folders after a project ends?
Project folder structures are usually created up front from a template, with subfolders for every phase of work. Not every phase gets used on every engagement, and files get moved or deleted as a project evolves. What is left behind is a skeleton of empty folders that stay in place indefinitely because nobody owns the job of removing them.
Does removing empty folders in SharePoint free up storage quota?
Empty folders themselves take up negligible storage. The value of removing them is navigation and search clarity, not quota. The real storage savings in a project closeout cleanup usually come from trimming version history and clearing the recycling bin, which is why those two steps are typically run alongside an empty folder cleanup rather than instead of it.
How often should an agency run a SharePoint project closeout cleanup?
Most agencies find a monthly or quarterly cadence works well, timed to when a batch of projects moves to closed or archived status. Waiting a full year lets clutter and version bloat build up across dozens of sites at once, which turns a routine tidy-up into a much bigger job.