How to clean up your sharepoint site to reduce space

It is very important to clean up your SharePoint site from time-time to free up more datatbase space and for better performance. At end-user side you can try various options to clean up your site and help admin reduce their work.
Some of the things that users can quickly manage are -

1. Empty End-user recycle bin –

In our effort to free up some space we suggest that each user should Empty Out the “End-user recycle bin”.

What is End-user recycle bin?

When you delete an item from your SharePoint site, the item is sent to the site’s Recycle Bin. If you click on the Recycle Bin in the Quick Launch (left navigation), you can see all of the items that you’ve deleted from your site. This recycle bin in left Navigation is actually referred as user’s recycle bin or End-user recycle bin. You can use this recycle bin to restore the items that you have deleted from this site or to empty deleted items.

2. Version Trimming –

As you know that a new version is created each time a user checks in the document and it adds up to the old existing versions of that document.

Although, these versions are useful in tracking changes, each of the versions is a copy of the document and takes up a chunk of space in site’s allocated Storage space.

To clear up some space unneeded file versions must be deleted and specified number of versions should be maintained.

Define Version limit - Each document library can be setup to save pre-specified number of versions for any given document in that library. To do these follow the steps below.

1. Login as Site admin and Navigate to the document library you want to trim the versions of.

2. In document library click on Settings -> Document Library Settings.
3. In document Library settings page click on “Version Settings”.
4. On Version Settings Page in “Document Version History” section select “Keep the following number of major versions: ” and then enter the number 5 in the textbox below.
I recommend saving only 5 major versions at a time but its completely your choice.
5. Next click Ok and Navigate back to the document library.
You have now successfully set-up a limit on number of versions each document can have.

To reduce Versions for existing documents –

1. Select the document you want to trim the versions of.
2. Checks out the document edit it (if required) and check it back in. The document now will have only five most recent versions saved in its version history.
Any document edited (or checked in) in the library will now have only five most recently checked in versions saved.

3. Delete Unwanted Documents –

It is sometime important to identify the unwanted content in your site and delete it. For example if a document is not used and is sitting in the site from a long time with number of versions the document might be creating unnecessary issues while data retrial and might be taking a huge chunk of space in sites storage space.

The easiest way to do this is by creating a new view in your document library with an ascending sort order on the Modified field.

To create this view follow the steps –

1. Login as Site admin and Navigate to the desired document library.

2. In the document library click on the View drop-down in top right and select create View.

3. Next select Standard View and in the create new give your view a Name. Next, select the Name, Modified and Created columns from the list of columns available. Next, Scroll down to select sort order. Set Sort by the column to “Modified” and select Show items in ascending order. Once done click Ok.

The view will now give you the documents which were not recently modified at the top.