Does disabling version history delete the old versions?

Question

SharePoint 2010: I have several libraries that have version history enabled. In trying to save storage space and money, I need to delete duplicates/old copies. If I just turn off version history, does that delete all the old versions?

Answer 1

Versions will not get delete until you explicitly press the Delete All Version button.

You can easily validate this by creating a test library, then add a document and create multiple versions. Then change the setting and select Versioning equals No. Add some changes to the file. Then again go back to setting and select Versioning equals Yes. Check the version history and you can see all of the previous versions.

An interesting read about this topic http://naimmurati.wordpress.com/2013/08/28/effects-of-temporarily-disabling-versioning-for-a-sharepoint-document-library/

Answer 2

Disabling the Version will not delete the versions of documents. Recently, we had an issue Document Library which having unlimited version enabled and created thousands of version of each item. this cause big performance issue for the site.

In order to resolve the issue.

• we limit the maximum versions to 5.
• Check Out and Check In each documents, this will trim all old versions.
• for check in & check out, our developer write a small piece of code,which check out/In each document programitcally.