Kiri Tane is the IT manager for a 220-person environmental advocacy nonprofit. Their Microsoft 365 Business Standard tenant had accumulated six years of SharePoint content across 47 sites. Usage had quietly grown to 2.7 TB out of a 3.2 TB storage pool. At the annual budget review, the finance director asked a direct question: do we need to upgrade our plan? The upgrade would cost an extra $3,800 per year. Kiri wanted a better answer.
The storage problem Kiri found
The first move was generating a storage report using Report Master. Within a few minutes, Kiri had an Excel workbook showing every site, library, and document in the tenant ranked by storage consumed. The numbers were uncomfortable to look at.
What the audit revealed
Two findings dominated the report. First, version history was consuming 1.1 TB - that was 41% of total tenant storage, locked in revisions of documents nobody had opened in years. Several libraries had been left at SharePoint's default "no limit" versioning setting, meaning every edit since 2019 had been saved in full.
Second, the Communications team's media library held 8,400 image files totalling 190 GB. Every campaign banner, photo asset, and event image uploaded over six years lived there at full resolution, untouched since publishing day.
Everything else - active documents, lists, and current project files - used about 1.4 TB combined. That content was genuinely needed. The 1.3 TB from version history and oversized images was not.
Stage 1: Trimming version history with Version Trimmer
Version history is almost always the largest source of recoverable storage in an established SharePoint tenant. Most organisations keep far more versions than they will ever need: a document edited 200 times since 2020 may have 200 versions stored, even though the last five would cover any realistic recovery scenario.
Choosing the retention threshold
Kiri set a rule of keep the last 10 versions per file, with an explicit exclusion for any library under a compliance or legal-hold policy. The compliance officer confirmed no document libraries were subject to retention requirements that would restrict trimming. Ten versions was deliberately conservative, leaving more than enough history for accidental edit recovery or review-cycle rollback while still clearing the backlog of old snapshots.
Running the trim
Version Trimmer, part of ShareMaster's Space Master suite, showed a preview of the impact before committing anything. The preview flagged 1.1 TB of versions eligible for removal under the selected rule. After spot-checking a handful of high-version-count libraries, Kiri ran the trim overnight - by morning, version history had dropped from 1.1 TB to 280 GB, freeing roughly 820 GB in a single run.
Learn more about Version Trimmer | Try Space Master free for 14 days
Stage 2: Compressing the image library
The Communications media library was a different kind of problem. Nobody was going to delete six years of campaign photography, but nobody needed it stored at 18-megapixel resolution either. The images were published to a website and shared with a print vendor; once a campaign closed, the originals served no practical purpose at their original file size.
Image Reducer, also part of Space Master, processed all 8,400 files in the library, compressing each one while preserving quality at typical screen and print-review resolutions. A filename filter excluded the handful of high-resolution originals still in active production.
Result: the Communications library dropped from 190 GB to 74 GB. A 61% reduction, with no complaints from the Comms team about visual quality when they next opened the library.
Stage 3: Removing empty folders
The Report Master export also flagged 4,200 empty folders scattered across the tenant: abandoned project structures, renamed departments, and migration artefacts from a 2021 document drive import. Empty folders consume negligible storage on their own, but they create navigation clutter and make SharePoint search results harder to interpret.
Empty Folder Remover cleared all 4,200 in a single run. Kiri ran a preview first to confirm none were placeholders for an active project. None were. The cleanup took about 12 minutes.
The outcome
Three targeted operations over one afternoon reduced the tenant's storage footprint from 2.7 TB to under 1.8 TB. No PowerShell scripting. No support tickets. No accidental deletions of live content.
| Category | Before | After | Saved |
|---|---|---|---|
| Version history | 1.1 TB | 280 GB | ~820 GB |
| Image library | 190 GB | 74 GB | ~116 GB |
| Empty folders | 4,200 folders | 0 | Cleaner navigation |
| Total storage | 2.7 TB | ~1.77 TB | ~936 GB (35%) |
Kiri went back to the finance director with a revised answer: the 3.2 TB tenant quota was now 55% utilised, leaving headroom for roughly two more years of growth at the organisation's current rate of document creation. The plan upgrade was postponed indefinitely.
If your tenant is approaching its storage limit, see also the full guide to reducing SharePoint storage quickly for additional techniques including bulk file deletion and site archive options.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is it safe to delete old SharePoint file versions?
Yes, with care. Version history is a safety net, not a permanent archive. Trimming to the last 5-10 major versions is safe for most document libraries. The key exception is libraries subject to compliance or legal-hold policies: verify with your compliance officer before trimming any content in scope for a retention requirement.
How do I find which SharePoint sites use the most storage?
The SharePoint admin centre shows site-level storage usage. For a detailed breakdown by library, version history, and file type, Report Master exports a full storage analysis to Excel across all sites in the tenant - no PowerShell required.
Will compressing images in SharePoint affect their quality?
Image Reducer targets file size reduction while preserving visual quality at typical screen and print-review resolutions. Images used for web publishing or internal communications are well within this threshold. High-resolution originals kept for production printing should be excluded from compression runs if maximum fidelity is required.