726 GB recovered, with no documents deleted

The result

Kelham Concept's SharePoint is back within its allowance. It had grown to about 1.5 TB against an allowance of about 1 TB, which stopped the team saving their work. It now uses 760 GB.

No documents were deleted. The space came from old copies of files that SharePoint had kept every time someone pressed save, and those copies can still be restored until January 2027. Before anything was removed, every file was copied to two separate drives and checked.

Kelham now also has Kelham Backup, a simple Mac app we built to keep those drives up to date.

The problem

Kelham Concept is a firm of chartered building surveyors in Sheffield. Its shared files came to about 285 GB, but SharePoint was storing roughly four times that, because it keeps a full copy of a file every time it is saved. The practice's photo schedules are large files saved hundreds of times, so a handful of documents filled the allowance.

Microsoft then set the library to read-only. The team could open their files but not save them, and the fix on offer was to buy more storage.

What we did

We made two complete, checked copies of every file first, one on the practice's own drive and one on ours.

Then we set SharePoint to stop keeping unlimited old copies, so the problem cannot build up again.

Then we cleared the excess old copies under clear rules: every current file kept, recent history kept, and anything edited in the last fortnight left alone. Each step was checked against the backups, and the work stopped on anything unexpected. That freed 726 GB from 94 files.

What happens next

We are turning the same approach into a tool for archiving finished jobs, so the library stays lean. That work is in progress, and it will not remove anything until it has been proved on a trial.

Our System Care service covers storage, backups and recovery, and custom software covers tools such as Kelham Backup. If your SharePoint has run out of room, get in touch.