Office 365 - Version History using massive amounts of storage

[DavR]

Has anyone else had trouble with the version history feature in OneDrive / SharePoint causing files to take up massive amounts of space?

 

We're finding that, in some cases, version history is multiplying the size of our files - for instance, one 200MB PowerPoint had 48 historical versions, and was taking up over 10GB of storage! This is particularly problematic for us, as with the coming re-think of O365 storage, our users are going to be capped at 100GB storage quotas in their OneDrive (still winging it on A1 here).

 

I've been banging my head against a wall for a day or so trying to reduce the number of versions kept for a particular user that was over the limit, and by disabling minimum version history for our tenant (MS guidance is 100 save points should be the minimum), then setting a max version history of 5 revisions on the users OneDrive, and running some PowerShell scripts to remove old versions, I've managed to get the user down from 108GB to 47GB. But it wasn't exactly a neat process.

 

Has anyone else tried to tackle this? Or have we just accepted the storage hit and moved on?