How OneNote Page Version History Affects OneDrive Storage

Microsoft’s free email, Outlook.com, comes with 5 GB of free storage in the OneDrive. I am currently using 20 GB of my allotted 30 GB and was curious what was taking up so much space.

(I am a lucky gal who has 30 GB for free from a previous promotion.)

Fortunately there’s a fantastic tool in OneDrive that helps you figure this out. Check it out:

This will take you to your OneDrive Manage Storage Options. Next, click on the “What’s taking up space?” button.

This will take you to the “Largest files in your OneDrive” page. This files will be listed from Largest to Smallest. To see the actual file size, select the checkbox beside the file, and click on the Information button in the far right side of the Ribbon.

This will open the Information Pane. Scroll down to the bottom of the pane and you will see the File Size.

Whoa! 495 MB? This seemed rather large so I used free online Bing Digital Storage Unit Converter Tool to double check my math – and was shocked to confirm that one OneNote file was taking up almost half a GB in storage.

Back in OneDrive, I used the “Open File Location” button to open the file in OneNote Online. I realized that this OneNote section in the Notebook was stuffed full of images and screenshots.

Side Note: I use OneNote to collect items that I want. Instead of going out and spending money on things, I collect images of the items

However, storing images in OneNote is not the critical issue that’s impacting my storage.

If it were, my “Fashion” Notebook would be at the top of the largest file list as every page contains dozens and dozens of images. However, a quick check in my list of files in OneDrive shows that entire Notebook is only 251 MG.

The largest notebook I have is my Kelly Marshall Notebook. It is 1.17 GB however it contains significantly less images and is almost all text. However, this was the first notebook I ever created. It is also the notebook I work in the most.

So what’s affecting my storage?

Here’s my opinion. Version History is the culprit. OneNote create a new version when a change is made to a page and it has been an hour since the last version was created.

Some facts on OneNote Page Version History:

Version history can be turned off or disabled for an entire Notebook.

You can also delete old page versions for a single Page (one-by-one via the right-click menu).

You can also delete all version in a Section or a Notebook with one click via the Ribbon.

Here’s an image of what the Page Versions button looks like in OneNote 2016:

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