A question of curiosity from a storage consumption perspective. 

When you make version controlled changes to a document stored in a SP2013 library, does SharePoint store / save unique copies of each document, like a snapshot. So, for example, if I had a 10kb Microsoft Word document with 10 versions, can I assume it is consuming at least 100Kb in the SharePoint content databases?

Is it possible to set SharePoint to capture / retain just the differences between the two versions of a document to reduce overall storage consumption?

If Shredded storage is enabled (which is by default), SP will only store difference between the versions of document.

Hope this helps.

Hi R Ashcroft,

From my point of view, you want to only retain the modified part of the documents for reducing the storage in SharePoint.

As Mohit said, there is a new data platform called Shredded Storage in SharePoint 2013, and it is enabled by default. We can use it to save the changes between the versions. It can be enabled or disabled on a Web application and Site level.

Here is an article to introduce Shredded Storage:

http://www.informedconsulting.nl/blog/shredded-storage-a-new-feature-in-sharepoint-2013/

Best regards,

Linda Zhang