Free. Read-only. Early access. CloudSniff can see your storage, but it can never change your files.

CloudSniff · Early access · read-only diagnostic

You deleted things and storage didn't drop. Here's why.

The job: figure out what's actually eating your storage. I scan your OneDrive or SharePoint and show what's really taking the space. You see old file copies, forgotten files, and — on a work or school account that's over its SharePoint limit — the monthly cost you didn't know about. Read-only — nothing gets changed, and I never see what's inside your files.

Microsoft's built-in storage views show totals — never the old file copies sitting behind them. CloudSniff shows you exactly that.

Most scans take about a minute. Very large accounts take longer because Microsoft limits how fast apps can read data.

Join cleanup waitlist

Free. No credit card. You can disconnect anytime.

104 GB used of a 100 GB limit — with no breakdown of what's in it. Example: a personal OneDrive that just went over its 100 GB plan.These are sample numbers so you can see how a scan looks. Your scan shows your real ones.

Show me the view for…

On a personal account, there's no bill to cut — just a picture to see.

Microsoft charges $0.20 per GB per month for SharePoint storage above your limit — about $2.40 per GB per year. That's Microsoft's published pay-as-you-go rate. A company sitting 500 GB over the line pays $1,200 a year for storage that is mostly old file versions.

This rate applies to storage above a SharePoint limit, on OneDrive for work or school and SharePoint. A personal Microsoft account works differently: there's no per-GB charge, and Microsoft doesn't document old versions as counting against your storage limit the way they do on a work or school account. So CloudSniff shows you what version history exists on a personal drive — it doesn't quote you a saving there.

OneDrive keeps up to 25 previous versions of your files for 30 days. On a personal account that history isn't documented as counting against your storage limit — so the honest answer here is a clear inventory, not a dollar figure.

With a personal Microsoft account, OneDrive keeps previous versions of every file type for 30 days, and you can retrieve the last 25 versions. CloudSniff shows you exactly what version history exists on your drive. Microsoft doesn't document that history as counting against a personal storage limit, so there's no saving to quote here — just a clear picture. Sample numbers — your scan uses your real ones.

What this does — and what it deliberately doesn't

Right now CloudSniff is deliberately small: it looks, it reports, it changes nothing. Cleanup stays off until the project has a company, insurance, and a lawyer-reviewed terms of service behind it — none of which exist yet.

What it does

Read-only diagnostic via Microsoft Graph.

  • Reads file names, sizes, dates, owners, and version counts — never what's inside your files.
  • Estimates the monthly dollars wasted if your company is over its SharePoint limit and paying Microsoft's $0.20/GB pay-as-you-go rate for the overage.
  • Shows how close you are to your storage limit on Microsoft 365 Personal and Family plans.
  • Breaks storage down into old file copies, trash, forgotten files, and the biggest space hogs.
  • Lets you vote for which non-Microsoft provider (Dropbox, pCloud, Google Drive) gets built next.
What it doesn't do (right now)

Deferred until a legal entity exists.

  • Delete anything. Cleanup is hard-disabled in code; no write scopes are requested.
  • Store file contents. Only file names, sizes, and dates ever touch the database.
  • Charge money. No subscription, no paywall, no free trial. GitHub Sponsors and Ko-fi donations only.
  • Support non-Microsoft providers. Dropbox, Google Drive, pCloud are gated on the voting widget — pick one to push to the front of the queue.
  • Ship monitoring or alerts. No scheduled re-scans, no email alerts, no team dashboard. All deferred to Phase 2+.

Where this comes from

I'm Andrei Antipenko — years of IT support work, first inside the company I work at, then watching the same pattern repeat with their partners, then realizing every IT forum had the same posts every week. People paying for storage they couldn't account for. Old versions piling up silently. Microsoft's tools assuming you could write PowerShell. Most people gave up trying to clean up and just paid the upgrade. If the platform vendors had shipped effective version-cleanup and file-archival tools, CloudSniff wouldn't need to exist.

I've seen this everywhere

I've seen it in my own IT work and with the clients and partners I've supported. It's all over public discussions on Reddit and Microsoft's own support forums. These are the stories I keep running into — retold in my own words, names removed.

Showing 11 of 11 stories.

These stories are retold in my own words from public posts on Reddit, Microsoft Tech Community, and Microsoft Q&A. No real names, no exact quotes, no links to specific posts.

These discussions are public — see for yourself: r/OneDrive on Reddit · Microsoft's community forum.

Confusion

A student found one frequently-edited PDF holding over 200 saved versions. That single file explained most of their storage problem. They only discovered it by accident.

— A student, in a public Reddit discussion · paraphrased
Confusion

Their OneDrive was packed with old versions of client tax files. In busy season, just finding the current copy of a return cost real time.

— A solo accountant, in a public Reddit discussion · paraphrased
Confusion

They got named 'the Microsoft 365 person' at a small construction firm — no IT background. The admin center's storage reports left them feeling less informed, not more.

— An office manager at a small firm, in a public Reddit discussion · paraphrased
It piles up

One reconciliation spreadsheet, edited all the time, had quietly piled up more than 3,500 saved versions. That one file ate hundreds of megabytes of their storage.

— A bookkeeper, in a public Reddit discussion · paraphrased
It piles up

PowerPoint files across the company held close to 900 GB — almost all old versions. Nobody had ever changed the default 500-version setting.

— An IT admin, on Microsoft's own community forum · paraphrased
Ran out of space

They inherited a SharePoint sitting at 2.76 TB used of 2.89 TB, full of years-old folders. They had no idea where to start without deleting something important.

— A newly-appointed admin, on Microsoft's support forum · paraphrased
Ran out of space

An employee left. Their OneDrive got moved into SharePoint. Overnight the company went from 'plenty of storage' to paying extra.

— An IT lead at a small firm, in a public Reddit discussion · paraphrased
Gave up

Cleaning up OneDrive by hand would have taken a whole weekend. They decided they'd rather pay for the bigger plan than spend Saturday clicking through version menus.

— A one-person consultancy owner, in a public Reddit discussion · paraphrased
Gave up

They gave up on Microsoft's built-in cleanup tools and wrote their own PowerShell scripts. Nothing in the admin console let them see or fix the bloat at scale.

— An IT admin at a managed-services firm, in a public Reddit discussion · paraphrased
Paying extra

OneDrive kept saying 'storage full' even though the family plan clearly had room. They were tempted to just pay for the next tier instead of losing another evening to it.

— A parent on a family plan, in a public Reddit discussion · paraphrased
Paying extra

The firm paid for more storage at every renewal. Nobody had time to check whether the real problem was too many files — or too many copies of the same files.

— A law-firm associate, in a public Reddit discussion · paraphrased

Sample scan results across CloudSniff's typical user segments

These are sample numbers so you can see how a scan looks. Your scan shows your real ones. The $0.20 per GB per month figure is Microsoft's published pay-as-you-go rate for SharePoint storage above a limit, and version history counts against your storage on OneDrive for work or school and SharePoint. A personal Microsoft account has no per-GB charge and no documented version-storage charge — there CloudSniff reports what version history exists, not a saving.

Personal M365 user: 104 GB used of a 100 GB limit — with no breakdown of what's in it.
Example: a personal OneDrive that just went over its 100 GB plan. With a personal Microsoft account, OneDrive keeps previous versions of every file type for 30 days, and you can retrieve the last 25 versions. CloudSniff shows you exactly what version history exists on your drive. Microsoft doesn't document that history as counting against a personal storage limit, so there's no saving to quote here — just a clear picture.
Solopreneur / freelancer: 145 GB of old file versions across 18,400 files.
Example: a freelancer on a 1 TB plan where every saved draft kept an old copy. On a personal Microsoft account, Microsoft doesn't document old versions as counting against your 1 TB limit — so the win here isn't a smaller bill. It's knowing how much runway you have left, and being able to find the current copy of anything.
Small business owner: 500 GB over a 2.89 TB shared limit.
Example: a small company whose SharePoint sites went read-only last month. About $1,200/year. 500 GB above the limit × $0.20 per GB per month — Microsoft's published pay-as-you-go rate for SharePoint storage.
Accountant / lawyer / consultant: 208 GB of tax workpapers — 87% are old versions.
Example: an accountant's shared client site, where the current copy hides under years of revisions. About $434/year. Those 181 GB of old versions are exactly what puts this site over its limit — 181 GB × $0.20 per GB per month.
Sysadmin / IT lead: 893 GB of PowerPoint versions — the 500-version default nobody changed.
Example: a mid-size company sitting 893 GB above its SharePoint limit, all of it old slide decks. About $2,143/year. 893 GB above the limit × $0.20 per GB per month, Microsoft's published pay-as-you-go rate.

Why this is safe to try

  • Free, no credit card. Donations are optional.

  • Read-only access. CloudSniff never asks for write, delete, or file contents. Microsoft's consent screen shows the exact scope.

  • You can disconnect anytime. Personal accounts: Microsoft's "Apps and services" page (account.live.com/consent/Manage). Work or school: "App permissions" at myaccount.microsoft.com. CloudSniff can't reconnect unless you approve it again.

  • Auto-deletes after 90 days. Your scan data clears itself, even if you forget about CloudSniff.

  • Tokens live ≤15 minutes. CloudSniff mints a fresh access token from Microsoft for each scan, uses it for at most 15 minutes, then discards it. The access token never sits in the database.

Why this is piling up faster than it used to

This one is about OneDrive for work or school and SharePoint — that's where every saved version counts against your storage.

On OneDrive for work or school and SharePoint, Microsoft stores every version of a file as a complete copy, not a diff — and every copy counts against your storage. In its own example, you add a 100 MB file to a SharePoint library with versioning on, edit nothing but the title, and storage now reports 200 MB — "this behavior is by design".

Microsoft's own cleanup documentation says Copilot meeting recordings and transcripts are "continually created" and have "little business value after 1-3 months" — and it ships a tool to delete them.

Copilot Pages keeps up to 50 versions of every page, on by default, and your admin cannot turn that off (Microsoft 365 message center notice MC1162965).

In SharePoint, Microsoft's own automatic version limits trim 94-96% of version storage compared with fixed count limits — that is Microsoft measuring how much of this was never worth keeping (Plan version storage). Those limits are not retroactive — more on that below.

Common questions

  • Will you charge me later?
    No subscriptions, no surprise charges. If I add paid cleanup later, it'll be a one-time purchase with the price shown upfront. Only if you choose to use it. The free read-only scan stays free.
  • What is OneDrive version history bloat?
    Every time you save a file, OneDrive or SharePoint keeps the old copy too. On OneDrive for work or school and SharePoint, that's up to 500 versions per file by default, and every one of those versions counts against your storage. A 10 MB document saved 200 times can occupy 2 GB there. On a real business tenant we measured 212 GB of storage consumed by 44 GB of actual files — 4.9× overhead. Across a small company, old versions can quietly grow to terabytes, and OneDrive never shows them as a separate category. Above a SharePoint limit, Microsoft's published pay-as-you-go rate is $0.20 per GB per month, so a company that's well over the line can be paying thousands a year for old versions. A personal Microsoft account is a different story: OneDrive keeps previous versions of every file type for 30 days and lets you retrieve the last 25, but Microsoft doesn't document that history as counting against your storage limit — so there CloudSniff shows you what version history exists, and stops short of promising you space back.
  • Microsoft 365 Archive is cheaper — why not just archive it?
    Archive is $0.05 per GB per month, four times cheaper than extra storage, and it's a good answer for content you want to keep but never touch. Old file versions aren't that. Nobody wants forty drafts of the same deck, at any price. Clean first, archive what survives.
  • Why does Microsoft's consent screen say "unverified publisher"?
    CloudSniff is a one-person project, not a registered company yet. Microsoft's "verified publisher" badge takes forming a legal entity and passing Microsoft's business verification (typically via a DUNS number) — both pending. The warning is accurate. The permission CloudSniff asks for (Files.Read.All, read-only) shows on Microsoft's consent screen and is the same either way.
  • What if I want to disconnect?
    You can disconnect anytime. Personal accounts: use Microsoft's "Apps and services" page (account.live.com/consent/Manage). Work or school accounts: use "App permissions" at myaccount.microsoft.com. Once you revoke access, CloudSniff can't reconnect unless you approve it again. Your scan data auto-deletes after 90 days regardless.
  • Why is my OneDrive storage full even after I delete files?
    Deleting a file doesn't always free up space. The recycle bin holds deleted items for 30-93 days. Backup-sync can re-upload deleted files. And OneDrive's "Free up space" and Files On-Demand only free space on your PC — the files still count against your cloud storage. On OneDrive for work or school and SharePoint there's one more cause, and it's usually the big one: old versions. Up to 500 per file by default, all counting against your storage, and the storage view doesn't show them. On a personal Microsoft account, OneDrive keeps up to 25 previous versions for 30 days, but Microsoft doesn't document that history as counting against your limit — so if you're on a personal account, look at the recycle bin, backup-sync, and Files On-Demand first. Either way, CloudSniff shows you the whole picture, including the version history Microsoft's own storage view leaves out.

Does Microsoft already solve OneDrive version bloat?

Partly — if you're an IT admin who's comfortable with PowerShell. Microsoft ships real version-cleanup tools, and they're free. I'm not pretending otherwise. But they assume command-line skills, the new defaults don't clean up what's already there, and none of them show you what's wasting space in the first place. That last part is the job CloudSniff does.

The technical detail, for IT folks

Microsoft is shipping Intelligent Versioning and PST-specific version controls, and admin-center defaults let you cap new-library version counts. If you can drive PowerShell — New-SPOSiteFileVersionBatchDeleteJob, New-SPOSiteManageVersionPolicyJob and friends — you can trim a SharePoint tenant for free today.

Where the native tooling has documented carve-outs: Intelligent Versioning doesn't clean up items under retention policies or eDiscovery holds — Microsoft says version limits are ignored until the hold lifts (per Microsoft's own announcement on Tech Community); admin-center defaults are not retroactive — they only apply to new libraries; file-type-specific controls cover only audio, video, and Outlook PSTs (no PDFs, CAD, design assets, ZIP archives, source code); and site-level version policy is PowerShell-only — there's no admin-center UI to compose site or library policies. Trim jobs bypass the recycle bin, so the friction for non-PowerShell admins is real.

Today, this tool is just visibility — see your version inventory, see what your retention policies are doing to it, see the dollar number. If I add paid cleanup later, the wedge is in the gaps Microsoft hasn't closed: arbitrary file-type policy, folder/path exceptions, retention-policy-aware exclusions, and a durable audit trail outside the M365 boundary. Not a fictional restore promise — Graph offers no undelete primitive for trimmed versions, and I won't pretend it does.

Microsoft's admin report:
totals by user. No per-file breakdown, no version data.
TreeSize:
requires locally synced files — doesn't see cloud-only content.
CloudSniff:
scans directly via Microsoft Graph, no local sync needed.

Ready to see what's in your OneDrive?

About a minute, free, read-only.

Want cleanup? Join the waitlist below.

Cleanup waitlist

I'll turn on one-click cleanup once I have the company, insurance, and lawyer-reviewed TOS to do it responsibly — for OneDrive for work or school and SharePoint. Microsoft's API offers no way to delete a file version on a personal account, so I can't promise cleanup there at any point. Until then I'm collecting interest. Drop your email via the "I'd pay if cleanup comes back" button in the footer and I'll ping you when it's ready.