Joymon V/S Code: SharePoint.com storage requirement due to versioning

Introduction

Recently we were trying to migrate the document storage system from SQL FileStream to SharePoint.com. One of the criteria we are looking forward to in SharePoint.com is versioning. Since its SaaS model, we are sure the total storage is limited in SharePoint.com site. Obviously, we were interested in how the versioning affects the storage.

Question

Our first understanding was that Microsoft will be doing some magic behind the scene to capture the delta and the storage will not be the ~size of document * no of versions. But need confirmation we cannot just go with assumptions.

The question basically is does SharePoint.com count each version as an individual document or it stores only the changes similar to Git?

We did a good amount of google. But didn't get anything great that confirms the behavior. Fortunately, we are lucky to have Microsoft Development Manager with us. He did a good job finding the right people and finally, we got the answer.

Answer

It was different than what we think. Almost all versions count towards total storage. ie if there is a file of 1 MB and edited 3 times the total storage is 3 MBs.

We can easily confirm by browsing to the storman.aspx page.

https://<tenant>.sharepoint.com/_layouts/15/storman.aspx

The interesting thing is that there is no easy way to navigate to the storman.aspx page by clicking (at least to my knowledge or maybe because I am not an admin in any of the sites). We have to manually suffix the URL fragment starting from _layouts.

Below is a screenshot of what it looks like.