---
title: "Alter Version History retention in OneDrive"
canonical: "https://kb.uconn.edu/space/IKB/28349005825/Alter%20Version%20History%20retention%20in%20OneDrive"
format: markdown
---
Students, faculty, and staff may manually set the number of Versions that OneDrive stores for each file in their OneDrive. There is one setting that sets the rule for the entire OneDrive.

> ℹ️ **Why would I do this?**
> ℹ️ 
> ℹ️ If your OneDrive has large files (2GB or more), such as database files or video files, that are edited frequently, the storage consumed by their Versioning may quickly balloon out to many times the size of the real data. OneDrive stores a copy of the <u>entire file</u> for each version. 
> ℹ️ 
> ℹ️ Example: You make 20 edits to a 2GB file of the course of the week and OneDrive stores 20 Versions of the file, allowing you to go back in time in case you would like to restore the file to a previous state. This file is consuming 40GB (20 x 2GB) of space in your OneDrive.
> ℹ️ 
> ℹ️ The consequence of Versioning most files often goes unnoticed: 50 Versions of a 50KB Word document equals 2.5MB.

> ✅ 1. Instead of following this guide, you may simply copy your large(s) file to a new location in your OneDrive and then delete the original file(s). You can then move the file back into the original location. This will quickly remove previous versions but they will come back over time if the file is accessed consistently.
> ✅ 2. Instead of changing the retention settings of your entire OneDrive, you can move the files to SharePoint and change the retention settings there. You can also move the files to their own Document Library within a SharePoint site and change the retention settings on that Library specifically. Learn how: [Alter Version History retention in SharePoint](https://uconn.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/IKB/pages/28353036289).

## Change the retention setting

1. Visit [https://uconn-my.sharepoint.com/?p=22&setting=1](https://uconn-my.sharepoint.com/?p=22&setting=1) and continue to Step 2.
  1. If the above link does not work for you, visit your OneDrive at [s.uconn.edu/onedrive](http://s.uconn.edu/onedrive) and click on the settings wheel in the top right corner.
  2. Click on **OneDrive Settings** and then **More Settings** in the top left corner.
2. Click on **Return to the old Site settings page**.
3. Click on **Site libraries and lists**.
4. Click on **Customize “Documents”** to alter the settings on your OneDrive Document Library.
5. Click on **Versioning settings**.
6. The two relevant settings are “Version time limit” and “Version count limit”  
In order to set the count limit, you must change the time limit to “Manual”.
7. Consider the values you wish to set for these two settings:
  1. Take into account the size of the file, the frequency of edits, and the desired recovery duration.
  2. Example: I have a 2GB file that I update a couple times a day, but I really only need a week of backups. I can set the number of days to 7 and set the major versions to 7.  
:info: Remember that this setting affects your entire OneDrive. If you would like to only make changes to the version history of some data in your OneDrive, the data needs to be moved into SharePoint. Learn how: [Alter Version History retention in SharePoint](https://uconn.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/IKB/pages/28353036289).
8. Click **OK** at the bottom to save your changes.

## Related Guides

> Macro (contentbylabel)